Benjamin's Gift

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: The Shape of a Miracle : Part 1
With the publication of his first novel, Simple Prayers, Michael Golding was hailed as one of the most captivating new voices of his generation. Now he triumphs again with the enchanted tale of an eccentric connoisseur of beauty whose life is transformed

Chapter 1: The Shape of a Miracle : Part 2
As childhood gave way to adolescence and adolescence to manhood, Jean Pierre Michel found his life taking on the shape and specificity of one of his gathered objects. After selling enough bromide and licorice root to gather independent means

Chapter 1: The Shape of a Miracle : Part 3
Cassandra Nutt reached for the garments she'd lain on the crystal stand and began to layer them over Jean Pierre Michel's naked body; they were the crisp robes of an Arabian sheikh, complete with turban and veil.

With the publication of his first novel, Simple Prayers, Michael Golding was hailed as one of the most captivating new voices of his generation. Now he triumphs again with the enchanted tale of an eccentric connoisseur of beauty whose life is transformed when he meets a most unusual boy. Through wild adventures and wondrous discoveries, their relationship will lead them to a world of mind and heart, fear and grace, startling reality and transcendent magic.

His European-North Dakota-Jewish origins were humble, but New York tycoon Jean Pierre Michel Chernovsky eventually towered over a gilded era. To money itself he was indifferent. All that mattered was that he was able to surround himself with things of beauty, not the least of which was his exotic companion Cassandra Nutt, whose thirst for life was exceeded only by Jean Pierre's own fabulous hunger for cars, clocks, cloaks, pianos, horses, houses, swimming pools, airplanes, and lovers.

Then, at the age of seventy-one, Jean Pierre Michel finally acquires the one possession that has always eluded him: a son. Benjamin is an astonishingly beautiful orphan of the Depression, marred by only a single, striking imperfection: a strawberry birthmark that spreads, like the Russian steppes, across his right cheek and throat. Generous and selfish, prodigy and fool, he will grow to be the betrayed son, the spurned lover, the escaped Jew. And he will be blessed by a disturbing yet wondrous gift.

From New York to Amsterdam, from the Jazz Age to the Age of the Computer, Benjamin's Gift is a richly comic, deeply moving tour de force filled with vivid incident and incandescent characters. It is, in short, the story of our century.

Born and raised in Philadelphia and Miami, educated at Duke and Oxford, Michael Golding moved to New York in the eighties to pursue a career in the theatre. After several years of work Off-Broadway (including a season with the Lion Theatre Company on Theatre Row and playing Romeo in the Joseph Papp/Riverside Shakespeare Company production of Romeo and Juliet), he decided to move to Paris to begin writing.

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