The Day of His Youth

This is a novel about the first loss and all the losses that follow. Francis Hume enters the world the same moment his mother leaves it, and from his first breath, he belongs to the woods more than to society. His father Ernest raises him in isolation, building a rough paradise of trees and stream and masculine tenderness, where father and son become all the world to each other. But the forest cannot hold him forever. As Francis crosses into adolescence, the sounds of the outside world begin to reach him, and he encounters new people, feels new longings. The novel traces this inevitable unmooring: from innocence to experience, from the father's sheltering arms into the arms of another, from the simple life into the complicated one. Brown writes with precise, tender sadness about what growing up costs us. This is a book for readers who understand that every childhood is a country we leave without knowing it, and that some part of us stays behind in those early woods forever.