Jules Kincaid is a child writing prodigy of only fourteen when the novelist Arthur Brolin takes him from the slums of Chicago to a primitive, free lifestyle beach village in Indonesia late in WWI on a one-year writing sabbatical. Brolin says Jules has the necessary talent, but his writing does not yet have passion in it. Brolin isn't the only one who helps Jules to experiences that feed his passion and hone his writing.
After a long separation, Ali comes, without her new husband, to visit Al and his wife. Her ulterior motives become clear when she asks Al to recreate their first sex for his wife. Once again, true elements inspired this CNF story.
Deserted by her mom at age seven, young Stephanie is raised by her single parent father. He does a great job, and teenage Stephanie falls in love with her daddy. Not content with a normal father/daughter relationship, Stephanie lets her daddy know what she needs.
Brad is a respectable forty-year-old banker in the circus wintering town of Peru, Indiana, but he has a hankering for fourteen-year-old boys. He's working, in postwar 1949, on a scheme to "adopt," with fake papers, one of three boys he covers from a German male brothel, when, in Peru, he happens to come onto a knife-thrower's assistant, fourteen-year-old Alfonso, who has tried to drown himself in the Wabash River.