Leave Myself Behind
by Bart Yates
Category: Fiction

The Alex Award–winning novel of a young gay man’s search for meaning—from an author whose “voice is more than just honest or original; it’s real” (The Plain Dealer). Meet seventeen-year-old Noah York, the hilariously profane, brutally honest, completely engaging narrator of Bart Yates’s astonishing debut novel. With a mouth like a truck driver and eyes that see through the lies of the world, Noah is heading into a life that’s only getting more complicated by the day. His dead father is fading into a snapshot memory, and his psycho-poet mother has relocated them from Chicago to a rural New England hamlet that looks like a bad advertisement for small-town America. The house he now lives in is literally coming apart at the seams as he and his mother renovate the old Victorian—in which they discover disturbing clues to the mysterious existence of a woman who disappeared decades before. While his mother grows more obsessed with the mysterious woman, Noah fights his own troubling—but irresistible—obsession with the boy next door, the enigmatic J.D. It is J.D. who begins to quietly anchor Noah to his new life. J.D., who is hiding a terrible, haunting pain of his own that will affect Noah in ways he never thought possible . . . Part Portnoy, part Holden Caulfield, never less than truthful, and always fully human, Noah York is a touching and unforgettable character whose “blunt, funny and dead-on narrative” is sure to entertain and entrance readers (Brian Malloy).