Dendrites

Camden, New Jersey, 1980: abandoned houses, shuttered factories, poor neighbourhoods. A teenager, Pete, disappears, and his mother Louisa dies of grief the next morning. His twelve-year-old sister Minnie, now an orphan, unwittingly breaks into the life of her classmate Leto and unsettles her family's certainties, opening cracks rooted in the past, in the American dream, in second and third generations of immigrants, in the city's decline and in missed chances. Leto's stepfather, Basil Kambanis, searches for where things went wrong and confronts the fears of his own childhood, while his wife Susan drifts away from their uninspired life, and the two girls grow up in a harsh and unfair world.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

240 pages in the original

Genres

Family, Migration, Coming of age (assigned by AI)

Set in

United States, 1980

First published

2015 by Πόλις

ISBN

9789604354818 (original)

9781642861365 (World Editions, United States)