The Harder They Come

2017 Longlist

Sten Stenson, Vietnam veteran and retired school principal, and his wife, Carolee, are on a cruise in Costa Rica when their coach excursion is hijacked. Sten’s military training overtakes him and within moments one of the attackers lies dead. The rest flee and Sten finds himself hailed a hero by the tour group and everyone back home.

Meanwhile, in the redwood forests north of San Francisco, Sara – a farrier who refuses to recognize the authority of the government – is arrested after failing to cooperate with police at a routine stop. A chance meeting with twenty-five-year-old Adam, Sten and Carolee’s unstable son, sparks a strange but passionate relationship fuelled by a mutual hatred of the law. Adam, an angry and misunderstood outsider, perennially dressed in camouflage and with his head shaved to the bone, has an unhealthy obsession with nineteenth-century mountain man John Colter. As Adam’s views and behaviour become steadily more extreme, he descends into a spiral of fanatical violence that is impossible for his family or Sara to halt.

A deep and disturbing meditation on the roots of American gun violence, it explores the fine line between heroism and savagery, and just how far a parent can be held accountable for the actions of his child.

(from publisher)

About the Author

T.C. Boyle has published fifteen novels and ten collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in for his novel World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger for The Tortilla Curtain, as well as the 2014 Henry David Thoreau award for excellence in nature writing. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.

Librarians’ Comments

T.C. Boyle explores the American psyche and its complex mix of heroism, violence and paranoia. Powerful, exciting and unsettling.

A book that begins with a justified homicide and ends with outright murder. The Harder They Come maps the fine lines between the social and the anti-social, and the not-so-fine lines between sanity and madness, all written with T.C. Boyle’s trademark kinetic prose that can explode the most mundane moment into white-knuckle suspense.

Chosen by our readers.