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 Tom
Bedlam
As a boy, Tom Bedlam grows up fatherless and poor in South London in the
1860s. But everything changes when his wastrel of a father turns up; he
discovers the existence of an older brother who disappeared at birth;
and he is sent to boarding school. There he makes a Faustian pact that
will haunt his adult life, as he strives to create the family he dreamed
of in childhood and be the man his father was not.
Ranging from London to South Africa, from the Boer War to
the final months of the First World War, Tom
Bedlam captures the spirit of the times as it portrays a beguiling
hero wrestling with his loyalties, affections and conscience. Dramatic,
whimsical and shot through with lively humor, this is a novel as entertaining
as it is affecting.
"The author of the remarkably fine The
Laments (2004) returns with another deceptively modest but deeply
satisfying story of an intelligent and prickly family and the difficulty
of love."
-Kirkus
“Tom Bedlam is a terrific book and, for all its nutty improbabilities, in the end a bracingly sane one. It's not a truly old-fashioned novel; it's not (thankfully) anything so crass as a postmodern "subversion" of traditional fiction either. Hagen, like his hero, finds his own way, neither turning his back on his ancestry nor allowing it entirely to determine him. Providence may or may not be involved, but the novel is good enough to persuade you to believe in it, or at least in its utility in storytelling. Say what you will about coincidences, Tom Bedlam demonstrates that in the hands of a writer like George Hagen, they can help fiction fulfill its most basic responsibility: to make an impossibly large and dangerous world small enough to see whole.”
-New York Times Book Review
"All the right ingredients are here: a London sweatshop, a dank tenement house, long-lost siblings, dastardly scoundrels, mysterious benefactors and the requisite rise from rags to riches."
-The Washington Post
An excerpt from Tom
Bedlam
Published by Random
House
Available on Amazon
and at Barnes
& Noble
 The
Laments
When Howard and Julia Lament secretly adopt Will, a baby
switched at birth in a bizarre hospital debacle, it marks the beginning
of a journey that takes them from Rhodesia to the Middle East, Britain
to the New Jersey suburbs—for no matter where the Laments set up
home, the grass always seems greener on the other side of the ocean.
The Laments was a New
York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, a Wall
Street Journal Editors’ Pick, A
Book Sense Top Ten Pick, and a finalist in the Barnes & Noble
Fall 2004 Discover
Great New Writers Program, as well as a 2005 Summer Pick on Channel
Four’s Richard
& Judy’s Summer Read 2005, and won the William
Saroyan International Prize for Writing.
“Part travelogue, part melodrama and
part tall tale, The Laments is the playful and heartfelt story of a
family and a world that can’t sit still.”
—Los
Angeles Times Book Review
An excerpt from The
Laments
Crossing Continents: An Essay on The Laments
George interviewed on NPR on the subject of The
Laments
The Laments
on Amazon.com
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