A Small Gathering of Bones, Paperback

It's 1978, and Dale Singleton is becoming alarmed as his friend, Ian Kaysen, is afflicted with a mysterious and seemingly untreatable illness characterized by pneumonia, lesions, and dementia. This novel of the first days of AIDS is viscerally affecting, as it conveys the shocked puzzlement of those troubled by Ian's condition while simultaneously documenting Jamaican society's struggle to accept the dignity of gay love. Dale's world collapses, yet his experience of being gay in a middle-class culture circumscribed by church, family, and compulsory heterosexuality is hauntingly memorable-and familiar.

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Patricia Powell is the author of Me Dying Trial, The Pagoda, and a forthcoming novel, The Good Life. Her awards include the Bruce Rossley Literary Award, the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. Powell has taught creative writing at Harvard University, Wellesley College, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Currently she is Martin Luther King Visiting Professor at MIT. Powell lives in
Watertown, Massachusetts.