This funny, exuberant novel captures the reader with the grand sweep of seven-foot-tall David "Lizard" Hochmeyer's larger-than-life quest to unravel the mystery surrounding his parents' deaths. It's a journey laden with pro football stars, a master chef and his beautiful transvestite lover, a world-famous ballerina and her English rocker husband, and a sister who's as brilliant as she is unstable. A wildly entertaining, plot-twisting novel of murder, seduction, and revenge--rich in incident, expansive in character, and lavish in setting--Life Among Giants is an exhilarating adventure. Editors' pick for Amazon's Best of 2012 Shelf Awareness Top Ten Best Fiction of 2012 Columbus Dispatch's Top Books of 2012 Bill Roorbach is the author of five previous books of fiction, including The Girl of the Lake, the Kirkus Prize finalist The Remedy for Love, the bestselling Life Among Giants, and the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning collection Big Bend. His memoir in nature, Temple Stream, won the Maine Literary Award in nonfiction. Roorbach has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He held the William H. P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. His craft book, Writing Life Stories, has been in print for twenty-five years. His writing has appeared in Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Ploughshares, Granta, Ecotone, New York magazine, and other publications. He lives in Maine with his family. "Hilarious and heartbreaking, wild and wise, Bill Roorbach's Life Among Giants, which is earning comparisons to The World According to Garp, is a vivid chronicle of a life lived large." -Parade "An enchanting, darkly mysterious ballerina. A dead rock star. An unsolved double homicide, decades old. A father felled by a shadowy past. An older sister as beautiful as she is mad. A gay vegetarian chef covered in tattoos. His transvestite lover. Secret passageways, nighttime trysts, affairs, embezzling, illicit recordings--all of it revolving around one 6-foot-8, humble, sincere, Ivy League-educated orphaned professional football player. Really, what more could you want? As you might guess from its title if not from the list above, Bill Roorbach's second novel, Life Among Giants, is a larger-than-life production. Yet all of its wild characters feel genuine, their aches and flaws and desires wholly organic; and the plot they're tangled in moves forward at a breakneck pace. It's a dizzy romp. There's murder and intrigue and sex and terror, and Roorbach is generous with it all . . . Which isn't to say there isn't real meat here. Roorbach doesn't let the novel's rich entertainment stand in the way of emotional subtlety . . . [He] seems to relish creating lushly bold biographies for his characters, then getting the shading right--carefully applying depth and warmth." -The New York Times Book Review "A bighearted, big-boned story . . . Life Among Giants reads like something written by a kinder, gentler John Irving . . . Roorbach is a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful style." -The Washington Post "Consistently surprising and truly entertaining . . . Part thriller, part family drama, Life Among Giants is deliciously strange and deeply affecting." -The Boston Globe "[A] thrilling indulgence, a tale of opulence, love triangles, and madness, set against a sumptuous landscape of lust and feasts . . . This is a purely Gatsbyesque portrayal of celebrity." -Publishers Weekly, starred review "A compelling mystery . . . [Roorbach] knows how--in the best way--to manipulate and misdirect a reader." -The Columbus Dispatch (a Top Ten Book of 2012) "A few novels every year . . . achieve greatness . . . Life Among Giants is one of those blessed occurrences." -The Atlanta