Author(s): Lee Cole

Fiction | Charlotte

'An extraordinary debut' (ANN PATCHETT)
A coming-of-age story and an immersive love story.
Eager to clean up his act after his troubled early twenties, Owen has returned to Kentucky to take a job as a groundskeeper at a small college in the Appalachian foothills, one which allows him to enrol on their writing course. It's there that he meets Alma, a Writer-in-Residence, who seems to have everything Owen doesn't - a prestigious position, an Ivy League education, and published success as a writer.
They begin a secret relationship, and as they grow closer, Alma, from a supportive, liberal family of Bosnian immigrants, struggles to understand Owen's fraught relationship with his own family and home.
Exploring the boundaries between life and art, and how our upbringings affect the people we can become, Groundskeeping is at heart a love story - a novel about two very different people navigating the turbulence of an all-consuming relationship, and the complications which can ruin it.

Staff notes: This is a novel about choice: to leave, or to stay. It's about what kind of life a place - and the people within it - can offer, and if that's the life you want. 

Two writers meet at a Kentucky university and fall in love - one is a young and successful writer-in-residence, the other a groundskeeper auditing a creative writing class. Over the course of their relationship they must confront questions of class, privilege, and politics. LOVE this debut novel by Lee Cole. 

Recommended by Charlotte.