Last Comes the Egg: A Novel Book

Bruce Duffy achieved remarkable acclaim for his first book, The World As I Found It, a sweeping novel of ideas centering around the difficult personality of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ten years later, Mr. Duffy has produced a new book with a deceptively simple premise: a young boy copes with the loss of his mother during the tumultuous civil rights era. In a lesser writer's hands, Last Comes the Egg might have been just another coming-of-age novel, but Mr. Duffy takes the ordinary and makes something uncommon out of it. After his mother's death, 12-year-old protagonist Frank Dougherty takes off in a stolen car with two companions: Alvy, a tragically damaged altar boy; and Sheppy, an older African American boy with his own set of problems. Duffy displayed fearlessness in tackling Wittgenstein in his first novel; he puts it to the test again by confronting race issues here. Throughout Last Comes the Egg the prose soars, the characters fascinate, and the journey is both harrowing and riveting.Read More