"That was in June, fish-fly season, where each year our town is covered by the flotsam of those ephemeral insects. Rising in clouds from the algae in the polluted lake, they blacken windows, coat cars and streetlamps, plaster the municipal docks and festoon the rigging of sailboats, always in the same brown ubiquity of flying scum."

I'd no sooner call this book a novel rather than a book of poems, as every paragraph is a beautiful jumble of words.

"Nobody's grandfather had died, nobody's grandmother, nobody's parents, only a few dogs: Tom Burke's Beagle, Muffin, who choked on Bazooka Joe bubble gum, and then that summer, a creature who in dog years was still a puppy - Cecilia Lisbon."

bit of an epic read.