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.
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.
Male perspective bisexual: When you are a man/woman U.S. spy team in Southeast East and told to give a Laos-China-Myanmar border drug warlord whatever he wants to recruit him to support the national interest of the United States, you give him whatever he wants, even when he wants it from both of you.
Bella comes home from her first supposed date-night hookup - dressed too provocatively, smelling faintly wrong, and wet in all the places Tom both dreads and craves.