Coming In Early 2025
John Greenburn used to be somebody. Now, he’s just a middle-aged guy sitting behind his computer screen, waiting for his life to come to a screeching halt. Cognitive-Pharma, a Florida-based pharmaceutical company with deep pockets and a secret to hide, has caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice. The allegation? Medicare fraud. And no one is more on the hook than John who, as the Chief Ethics Officer at Cognitive-Pharma, has been the canary in the coal mine for the last 12 months. Not that his CEO cares much.
The CEO, a flashy, profit-driven “South Florida” type, certainly doesn’t care that John’s mother, Francis, is in desperate need of Cognitive-Pharma’s top-selling drug to slow her memory loss. Haunted by what he knows of the fraud allegations – and the investigation’s impact on the thousands of patients who depend on the medication – John draws closer to the memories he has of his mother, Francis, and the ways she pushed him to be somebody. And, not just somebody, but the greatest youth tennis player upstate South Carolina had ever known. With Francis’ memory deteriorating, John’s time to understand both himself and his mother, a product of the rough mill town that shaped her, is slipping away.
Life Close to the Bone moves from present-day Florida and back in time to John’s successful tenure on the youth tennis circuit and the textile mill in upstate South Carolina that, through Francis, shaped John’s adolescence. It depicts a matriarchal family’s relentless striving to overcome their “linthead” heritage and explores what it means to live for yourself and, ultimately, to forgive parents shaped by their own generational hardship.
Praise for Life Close to the Bone
“In Life Close to the Bone, debut novelist Michael Spake skillfully explores the complexity of the past and the impossibility of ever escaping its impact on the present. As protagonist John Greenburn, a former tennis star turned pharmaceutical ethics attorney, struggles to uncover the potential danger of a new drug, he is drawn back into a past that threatens to undermine all he’s worked to achieve. Despite his reluctance to revisit old traumas, John’s only hope for redemption is to face headlong the long-buried demons he has yet to acknowledge. Ultimately, John’s journey in connecting the past to the present belongs to all of us.”
– Cassandra King, author of Tell Me a Story: My Life with Pat Conroy
“Michael Spake spins a profoundly textured story of corporate intrigue, boundless greed corruption, and personal ethics amid a hardscrabble mill village legacy, and a meticulous mother’s rapid cognitive decline as her lawyer son reconciles their past through revelatory truths. Life Close to the Bone triumphs with the lasting impact of what strong mothers pass on to you.”
– Tim Conroy, author of Theologies of Terrain and No True Route
“Life Close to the Bone explores the complex dynamics of one man’s journey to escape the ties that bind and learn to love the life he has. Years of secrecy and the shame of growing up in poverty can certainly tangle family ties but they can also do serious damage to future generations if they are allowed to stay buried. For most of his life and through all of his accomplishments John has never been able to dig himself out from under the pressure his mother, Francis, has put on him to prove that she belongs. What will it take, how much can one man take, before it all comes crashing down? Michael Spake writes with an honest voice that instantly draws you in and breathes life to his characters.”
– Mandy Haynes, Editor-in-Chief of WELL READ Magazine, author of Walking the Wrong Way Home, Sharp as a Serpent’s Tooth: Eva and Other Stories, and Oliver
“Michael Spake clearly has a story to tell that haunts him. Corporate ethics lawyer John Greenburn’s work life unravels and thrusts him into dealing with a troubling relationship, the one he has with his mother.”
– Bren McClain, Author of One Good Mama Bone, winner of the French Prix Maya for Best Animal Novel, the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and the Patricia Winn Award for Southern Literature, published as Mama Red in France
“In this thoughtful coming-of-age debut novel, Michael Spake explores the past, reminding us that ‘It is forever a part of our experience, and we cannot disown it.’ An attorney himself, the author pulls back the curtain on the extraordinary ethical demands and challenges of the vocation in a culture of corporate greed while exploring the complicated and formative dynamics of family and expectations in the American South. Ultimately, this is a powerful story of self-discovery and transformation.”
– Rebecca Dwight Bruff, author of Trouble the Water
