Night Soil — Dale Peck

Family secrets, sexual explorations, art world wealth, and legacies of racism and environmental destruction collide in the new novel from Lambda Award-winning author Dale Peck

The art world falls in love with Dixie Stammers when it is discovered that not only are her pots mechanically perfect spheres, they are also identical, despite the fact that they are made entirely by hand, without benefit of a wheel, measuring device, or any other tool. Her teenage son, Judas, is pathologically shy, and retreats into a world of anonymous sexual encounters at a roadside rest area, although what he really longs for is a relationship with one of the boys at the private school he attends. This Academy was founded by Judas's ancestral grandfather, a nineteenth-century coal magnate. Driven by his mother's secretive nature, Judas's begins digging into his family's history, and the Academy's, until he unearths a series of secrets that causes him to question everything he thought he knew about his world.