The Boxer — Mike Tucker

"Nothing comes at you harder than life." Tommy, a first grader in Northern Arizona, traumatized by the death of his best friend, needs help. Despite the best efforts of counselors and psychologists in Northern Arizona, Tommy remains lost in a sea of grief. His family's priest reaches across the Pacific to an old friend, Jesse McCullough, an orphan and a boxer all his life in THE BOXER, a compelling, poignant meditation on grief, acceptance, faith, hope and charity. As Mike Tucker says in THE BOXER, "Everybody suffers but not everybody heals . . . people in need are people who need love more than anything else and we are all people in need." Inspired by an incident in a boxing gym in Malaysia in the summer of 2012, THE BOXER is a brilliant, classic mentor/novice story and a vibrant inner journey story. THE BOXER, Mike Tucker's fifth work of fiction and 11th international release, is the latest book by the only American writer in his generation that has been compared to Hemingway.