Garden Lakes

Garden Lakes, Jaime Clarke’s third novel featuring Charlie Martens, finds Charlie employed as an Arizona newspaper columnist who has built his career on a deception he committed that inadvertently stirred up anti-immigrant sentiment, casting a pall over the state. But Charlie's story is really one of serial deception, a life of prevarications he traces back to a summer fellowship program he attended while a junior at an all-boys prep school. The chosen fellows were tasked with undertaking supervised construction of a house in a half-built development donated to the school by the bankrupt developer. The fellows lived and worked together and were tested when a transient girl wandered into the development after the disappearance of both of the fellowship's chaperones. What happened at Garden Lakes reverberates through everyone’s lives, but especially Charlie's, which is forever altered by his actions that summer.

'It takes some nerve to revisit a bulletproof classic, but Jaime Clarke does so, with elegance and a cool contemporary eye, in this cunningly crafted homage to Lord of the Flies. He understands all too well the complex psychology of boyhood, how easily the insecurities and power plays slide into mayhem when adults look the other way' - Julia Glass, National Book Award-winning author of Three Junes
'In the flawlessly imagined Garden Lakes, Jaime Clarke pays homage to Lord of the Flies, and creates his own vivid, inadvertently isolated community. As summer tightens its grip, and adult authority recedes, his boys gradually reveal themselves to scary and exhilarating effect. In the hands of this master of suspense and psychological detail, the result is a compulsively readable novel' - Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy
'Smart, seductive, and suggestively sinister, Garden Lakes is a disturbingly honest look at how our lies shape our lives and destroy our communities. Read it: Part three in one of the best literary trilogies we have' - Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses’ Bridles
'As tense and tight and pitch-perfect as Clarke’s narrative of the harrowing events at Garden Lakes is, and as fine a meditation it is on Golding’s novel, what deepens this book to another level of insight and artfulness is the parallel portrait of Charlie Martens as an adult, years after his fateful role that summer, still tyrannized, paralyzed, tangled in lies, wishing for redemption, maybe fated never to get it. Complicated and feral, Garden Lakes is thrilling, literary, and smart as hell' - Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers