Life Among Giants

✍ Scribed by Roorbach, Bill

• Book ID: 108369648
• Publisher: Algonquin
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 222 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781616201562

✦ Synopsis

This funny, exuberant novel captures the reader with the grand sweep of seven-foot-tall David “Lizard” Hochmeyer’s larger-than-life quest to unravel the mystery surrounding his parents’ deaths. It’s a journey laden with pro football stars, a master chef and his beautiful transvestite lover, a world-famous ballerina and her English rocker husband, and a sister who’s as brilliant as she is unstable. A wildly entertaining, plot-twisting novel of murder, seduction, and revenge—rich in incident, expansive in character, and lavish in setting— Life Among Giants is an exhilarating adventure.

Editors’ pick for Amazon’s Best of 2012

Shelf Awareness Top Ten Best Fiction of 2012

Columbus Dispatch ’s Top Books of 2012

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2012: I hereby nominate Lizard the humongous football player and Sylphide the mysterious ballerina as two of my favorite characters of 2012. Rarely have such elite and outsize personalities felt so true on the page--a joy to be with, worth rooting for. We meet Lizard at age 17, when his parents are murdered, setting up his decades-long search for the truth behind his father's shady business dealings and his family's weblike relationship with the couple in the mansion next door: Sylphide, the world's greatest dancer, and her rock star husband. Like early John Irving, Roorbach has crafted a story that's rollicking and sexy but not shallow or slight. Seven-foot Lizard and petite Sylphide, both giants in their own way, are a pair to behold. Part Gatsby, part Garp, Life Among Giants is an urgent tale of greed, love, and revenge. --Neal Thompson

From Booklist

David “Lizard” Hochmeyer is enormous, nearly seven feet tall, and so is the labyrinth of tragedy and revenge he navigates in Roorbach’s novel. The high-school football star is headed to Princeton and then an NFL career when his parents are murdered. Both his and his sister’s lives are irreparably shaken and become significantly intertwined with the world-famous ballerina who lives nearby. Roorbach has created a memorable narrator who possesses the disarming frankness of Holden Caulfield and whose rapid-fire delivery and cutting characterizations expertly shift between memories and the present moment. Lizard keeps this part-mystery, part-coming-of-age-tale humming, as the cavalcade of revelations rolls by, prompting the reader to echo Lizard’s signature, “Whoa!” This is one of those novels you read because you care about what happens to the people and the connections between them as those connections grow, fray, and snap. By turns surreal and gritty, the book is written with the same muscular grace possessed by the dancers and athletes who are its main charaters. --Bridget Thoreson