Happy Endings by David Cook (1974)
Requirements: MOBI / ePUB reader, 512 kb
Overview: It’s not so much a novel as a series of vignettes about the lives of Morris, a 12 year old boy sent to an assessment centre after "interfering with" a 5 year old girl, and Stephen, a 33 year old schoolteacher who is attracted to teenage girls. The pieces are well written, as one would expect from this talented author, and are in turn amusing, disturbing and downright sordid. Happy Endings is fascinating and engaging. The sheer chutzpah of this man to have tackled such issues of child abuse and the path from victim to victimiser in the ’70s (he was little short of a prophet in that respect) and the novel itself being a testament from a gifted author struggling to find his creative feet. To anyone who has read and enjoyed Cook sublime later work, particularly Second Best (for which he also wrote the screenplay of the film) this book is heartily recommended. With David Cook’s death last year and Happy Endings having been out of print for many years so this could become a highly collectable book. But caveat emptor: Cook’s almost sympathetic portrayal of an ephebophile schoolmaster is apt to shock far more that it did at the time of publication.
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Download Instructions:
http://ceesty.com/wCqcV1
Mirror:
http://ceesty.com/wCqcV6
This hard-to-find book was converted by me to ebook from scanned images from an inter-library loan book
