Sam Lara's family owned a mill, and Otis Gable's father was a handyman, and the two boys were the entire fifth grade in their village school. Sam, wild and rebellious, left home at eighteen to explore the world beyond, while Otis took up hammer and wrench and paintbrush like his father and never left his native valley. Then in 1992, a world-weary Sam showed up in town again, silently accompanied by a handsome young Arab - servant or lover, no one could tell. He'd come back to claim his patrimony the vine-covered ruin of his grandfather's mill, and perhaps to heal a wound he'd inflicted thirty years before on his admiring classmate. Jonathan Strong has created unforgettable antagonists: quiet, bookish, brooding Otis and charismatic Sam, the prodigal who brings home all the tumult of the outside world. Their love/hate relationship fires up a story, by turns poignant and electrifying, that envelopes the reader like a myth in the making.