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Sensitive, big-hearted, and achingly self-conscious, 40-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confines of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. After twenty years under the Pygmalion-like path of his older partner, Walter, Aaron at last decides it's time to stop permitting life eventually him and also to take control of his own destiny. But soon after establishing himself in SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA - where he alternates between a shoddy garage apartment and the absurdly ramshackle ESL university where he teaches - Aaron views that real flexibility won't come until he has made peace with his remembrances of Morton, Minnesota: a cramped town whose 400 souls form a constellation of Aaron's childhood heartbreaks and expectations. After Aaron's dad died in the city parade, it was the larger-than life misfits of his childhood - a sardonic, wheelchair certain dwarf known as Clarence; a good, obese baker known as Bernice; a kindly aunt preoccupied with dreams of The Rapture - who helped Aaron find his put in place a provincial world hostile to difference. But Aaron's sense of rejection runs profound: When Aaron was 17, Dolores - Aaron's adoring yet selfish and enigmatic mom - vanished one evening with the city pastor. Aaron hasn't observed from Dolores in more than twenty years, but when a shambolic PI known as Bill offers an integral to closure, Aaron must confront his own role in his stressed past and rethink his put in place a world of unpredictable, life-changing pushes. Lori Ostlund's debut book is an openhearted contemplation of how exactly we grow up and move on, how we can turn our deepest wounds into our best advantages. Written with homespun elegance and unceasing vitality, After the Parade is a glorious new anthem for the outsider.
