Damnit, Jim

Tommy and Jim are the best of friends. Tommy’s life is one of tumult and violence, mostly at the hands of his drunken, abusive father. When his mother disappears one winter’s day, he and his sister Siri do their best to care for their young twin sisters, while staying out of the way of their fathers angry fists. After one particularly vicious beating Tommy has had enough and takes a bat to his father’s leg, breaking it. Even though everyone in the small village knew what was happening within those walls, nothing was done until Tommy’s desperate act. His father vanishes for good and soon the authorities come for the four children. Siri is placed with a family in a nearby village, the twins are taken in by a Christian couple down the street and Tommy goes to live with Jonson, who will guide the boy as best he can and give him a trade. Through all of this Tommy and Jim will remain friends until the boys are eighteen. After Jim attempts suicide, he spends several months in a psychiatric unit and after one fateful conversation, the friendship is severed.

Told from several points of view and hopping back and forth through time, this spare and elegant novel painstakingly peels back the layers of these lives and the lifelong toll that violence and indifference has taken on all of them.