Andrew Bourelle won the 2016 Autumn House Fiction Prize for his novel, Heavy Metal, a comming-of-age-story that gives us a glimpse into the life of Danny, a teenager who seeks peace and stability after the suicide of his mother.
A real gut-punch of a novel, Heavy Metal sings with energy and beauty and honest abandon about grief and hope and trying to find one’s balance in an unsteady world. At a certain point, the young narrator shoots a bottle out of the sky. “The glass explodes like a bottle rocket,” as he tells it, “The shards glinting in the firelight underneath the gray-lit sky.” The same can be said for this novel and family, both of which explode “like a bottle rocket, the shards glinting in the firelight underneath the gray-lit sky.” —William Lychack
Christopher Coake writes: Heavy Metal is a brilliant debut novel, at once an incisive, complex character study of damaged youth and a ferociously exciting page-turner. Andrew Bourelle knows that suspense is created not only by a loaded gun, but by the fears of the person holding it. He’s written one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.
It will be published in February of this year by Autumn House Press. Pre-order it here.
