The adventure of 17-year-old Evan's life begins with mowing a neighbour's lawn, an ordinary chore that launches him into an extraordinary world of adult desire, confusion, and betrayal. Rejected by his parents, struggling to make contact with a brother he barely knows, he learns the nature of exile in the urban, artificial world of South Florida -- a landscape that is, like this young man's imagination, both lush and troubling

They all thought I was good-natured, upright and responsible, generous, affectionate, and kind, and of course I could be those things, but there was much more to me than that, a side that often unnerved even myself, and this side included William.

Seventeen-year-old Evan's adventure begins with moving a neighbour's lawn, a summer job that leads him into an unpredictable world of desire and betrayal. Estranged from his parents and his older brother, he moves in with forty-one-year-old William and begins a disastrous series of attempts to make a new home. Must he choose between his family and desire? First published in 1999, Lawnboy wanders the tumultuous landscape of the early 1990s, its south Florida setting as fertile and troubling as Evan's inner life.