The Boy Who Went Away

Winner of the American Academy’s Rome Prize for Fiction and the McKitterick Prize, Eli Gottlieb’s tender, harrowing coming-of-age novel finally returns to print.

Denny Graubart, child-narrator and “domestic surveillance expert,” is having some terrible suspicions about his mother and autistic brother. It’s the 1960s, aka the Diagnostic Dark Ages of Autism, and while his mother struggles to keep his brother out of an institution, signs of something more disturbing are beginning to emerge befo...