Wild child

Spanning the landscapes of contemporary middle-America to eighteenth-century France, T. C. Boyle explores the improbable, the tragic, the allegorical and the seemingly ordinary : a feral boy captured and "civilised in Languedoc ; a widower who finds solace in a sea of rats ; a baseball star's mother abducted by guerrillas. Laced with Boyle's signature dark humour, Wild Child is a gripping, incisive and surprising collection of tales.