In This Way I Was Saved

On a chilly November afternoon, six-year-old Luke Nightingale's life changes forever. On the playground across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he encounters Daniel. Soon the boys are hiding from dinosaurs and shooting sniper rifles. Within hours, Luke and his mother, Claire, are welcoming Daniel into their Upper East Side apartment — and their lives.

Daniel and Luke are soon inseparable. With his parents divorcing, Luke takes comfort in having a near-constant playmate. But there's something strange about Daniel, who is more than happy to bind himself to the Nightingales. The divorce has cut Luke's father out of the picture, and as his increasingly fragile mother struggles with the insidious family depression, Daniel — shrewd, adventurous, and insightful — provides Luke both recreation and refuge.

As Luke grows from a child to an adolescent to a young man, he realizes that as much as his mother needs him, Daniel needs him more. Jealous of Luke's other attachments, Daniel moves from gestures of friendship into increasingly sinister manipulations. In the end, Luke finds himself in a daily battle for control of his own life — wondering whether he or Daniel will emerge victorious.

Brian DeLeeuw's debut is a haunting and provocative story of a family's love and madness that you will not be able to put down.

A breathtaking debut of literary suspense about a young boy's struggle against his inner demons--a fight to the death against his secret shadow self.

• Exciting new literary talent: At just twenty-nine years old, Brian DeLeeuw has worked in publishing in both London and New York City, where he is an editor at the literary magazine Tin House .

• Haunting subject: A dark, compelling story that skirts the edges of the supernatural, In This Way I Was Saved evokes the best in edgy, psychological horror with overtones of eerie, cerebral pyrotechnics. With its dense web of family secrets, its undercurrent of violence, and its brilliant evocation of a troubled young person’s point of view, it has earned comparisons to Donna Tartt.

• Compelling story: Set in the wealthy environs of New York City’s Central Park West, the story begins in 1994, when Luke Nightingale is six and his parents are finalizing their divorce. Luke’s fragile, volatile mother Claire is the last daughter of a crumbling, blueblood family; her mother died by her own hand. A novel about mothers and sons, the dangers of the imagination, the precariousness of sanity, the terrors of childhood, and the temptations of power— In This Way I Was Saved is a stunning debut by a writer of limitless promise.