Thomas McGurrin is a fourth-grade teacher and openly gay man at a private primary school serving Portland, Oregon's wealthy progressive elite when he is falsely accused of inappropriately touching a male student. The accusation comes just as Thomas is thrust back into the center of his unusual family by his younger brother's battle with cancer. Although cleared of the accusation, Thomas is forced to resign from a job he loves during a potentially life-changing family drama.
Davison's novel explores the discrepancy between the progressive ideals and persistent negative stereotypes among the privileged regarding social status, race, and sexual orientation and the impact of that discrepancy on friendships and family relations.
By turns rueful, humorous, angry, and wise, Doubting Thomas marks the debut of an important writer.
Price: $16.95
Pages: 272
Publisher: Bywater Books
Imprint: Amble Press
Publication Date:
08 June 2021
Trim Size: 8.50 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9781612941998
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
FICTION / LGBT / Gay, FICTION / Literary, FICTION / Family Life / General
“Sharply probing . . . Thanks to the care Davison pays to his characters—each one a fully realized, thinking human in Thomas’s orbit—what could be an over-serving of tragedy is instead delivered with clarity and nuance. The result is a novel that manages to take on a number of the world’s traumas . . . using the personal travails of a gay man at the dusk of Obama’s America to probe at the nature of what it truly means to know oneself.” —San Francisco Chronicle
MATTHEW CLARK DAVISON is a writer and educator living in San Francisco. He earned a BA and MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where he now teaches full-time. His prose has been recently anthologized in Empty The Pews and 580-Split, and published in Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, Foglifter, Lumina Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Per Contra, Educe, and others; and has been recognized with a Creative Work Grant, (Inaugural Awardee/San Francisco State University), Cultural Equities Grant (San Francisco Arts Commission), the Clark Gross Award for a Novel-in-Progress, and a Stonewall Alumni Award.
