The Boy Who Ran Away

'There are many boys in the world, all slightly different from one another, and most of them are referred to by names. These are often John or Jack or Desmond, but sometimes they are James or Philip or Simon. Once, and once only, there was a boy whose name was Fizzlebert.' Fizzlebert Stump lives in a travelling circus. But although he gets to hang around with acrobats, play the fool with clowns, and put his head in a lion's mouth every night, he's the only kid there - and he's bored. But then Fizz decides to join a library, and life suddenly gets a lot more exciting, when a simple library card application leads to him being kidnapped by a pair of crazed pensioners! Will he ever see the circus again?

Back when they were students Simon and his friend Ray had dreams to become rock stars. Fifteen years later, their mid-thirties are bearing down fast and they're having to accept a less glamorous life. Ray takes refuge from his responsibilities by living a virtual existence in online games. People say he needs to grow up, but everybody finds their own way of coping. But for Simon it's serial murder, mass slaughter and professional assassination.

A childhood in the 1950s and ‘60s among grifters, show girls, and mob enforcers who embraced the boy and made him who he is. “These stories make for one of the most important and moving American bildungsromans of all time.” —William Boyle, The Southwest Review Roy tells it the way he sees it, shuttled between Chicago to Key West and Tampa, Havana and Jackson MS, usually with his mother Kitty, often in the company of lip-sticked women and fast men. Roy is the muse of Gifford’s hardboiled style, a precocious child, watching the grown-ups try hard to save themselves, only to screw up again and again. He takes it all in, every waft of perfume and cigar smoke, every missed opportunity to do the right thing. And then there are the good things too. A fishing trip with Uncle Buck, a mother’s love, advice from Rudy, Roy’s father: “Roy means king. Be the king of your own country. Don’t depend on anyone to do your thinking for you.” The stories in The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea are together a love letter and a tribute to the childhood experiences that ground a life. In the Author’s note, Gifford writes, “I have often been asked if I were interested in writing my memoirs or an autobiography. Given that the Roy stories come as close as I care to come regarding certain circumstances, I remain comfortable with their verisimilitude. They all dwell within the boundary of fiction. As I have explained elsewhere, these are stories, I made them up. Roy ages from about five years old to late adolescence. After that, with the exception of a sighting in Veracruz, I have no idea what happened to him.” “The way Barry Gifford lets people talk articulates everything about their unfamiliar inner lives, and ours." —Boston Globe

He was the sole survivor when his village was massacred. The boy spends his days alone in the woods, feeling more of a kinship with animals than with the people who took him in but never really accepted him. Written as a middle grade novel about a Native American orphan trying to find a place in the world. The story is set six thousand years ago in the mid-archaic period of North American history.

Jesus recounts the parable of the son who, after leaving home and spending half his father's money, returns to his family and is joyously welcomed. Full color.

"Should appeal to all rugged individualists who dream of escape to the forest."—The New York Times Book Review Sam Gribley is terribly unhappy living in New York City with his family, so he runs away to the Catskill Mountains to live in the woods—all by himself. With only a penknife, a ball of cord, forty dollars, and some flint and steel, he intends to survive on his own. Sam learns about courage, danger, and independence during his year in the wilderness, a year that changes his life forever. “An extraordinary book . . . It will be read year after year.” —The Horn Book