American Sycamore

The lives of congenial American fly-fisherman Billy and his younger sister Alice meander alongside the Susquehanna River in this offbeat coming-of-age novel of death, madness, and fishing by debut author Karen Fielding. What starts out as a frolic of losers and drifters along the American riverscape flows into something more sinister when twelve-year-old Billy Sycamore encounters a stranger in the woods, while Alice is left to deal with the fall-out. In the spirit of Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America and idiosyncratic like a George Saunders story, American Sycamore is a funny and fractious narrative about growing up in a small town in northeast America, with not a lot to do, but a whole lot to worry about.