The Real Boy

Two boys. Two families. One mistake that can never be undone.

Kew Gardens, Queens, 1949. Two six-year-old boys sit in the same first-grade classroom at P.S. 99. Joel Luster is the cherished only son of Max and Trude, Jewish refugees who fled Vienna and rebuilt their lives from nothing. Gordy Dugan is the youngest child of Pat and Cathy, an Irish Catholic family. Pat came home from the war badly wounded.

Then a teacher makes an offhand remark she can never take back. Gordy bears an uncanny resemblance to Max and to Max's brother Yoel, who was murdered before the Lusters escaped. The boys were born on the same winter day in 1943 at the same small hospital. Each is living the other's life.

Trude would rather leave the past alone. Max cannot. Gordy may be the last living link to a family the war destroyed. What begins as an accident becomes a war of its own, fought in a Queens courtroom with blood tests, expert witnesses and lawyers on both sides. It pits faith against faith and neighbor against neighbor. Two mothers who have never met will come to know each other better than they ever wanted to. Two small boys must find out who they are.

Around them a postwar city is busy reinventing itself, certain the past can be left behind. The Real Boy is a moving novel about the families we are given, the families we make and the distance between them.

From Robert H. Lieberman, author of Baby, Paradise Rezoned and The Last Boy. "A remarkable and moving novel." (Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, on The Last Boy