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Lawton Passage
Hardcover
Publisher Price: $32.99
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Published: Jul 21 2026
Pages: 354
Weight: 1.20
Height: 0.94 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
This is an easy book to like ... Duning is a compelling, colorful prose stylist-so wherever he goes, readers will surely be happy to follow. - Kirkus Reviews (Verdict: GET IT)
Duning has a fine eye for the absurd choreography of respectability: the way a family can cultivate manners while quietly avoiding certain truths, the way a Christmas letter can be both a love song and scorecard, the way a child can understand more than adults think and less than he imagines. - Literary Titan, Gold Award Winner
From indirectness has its benefits to conspiring about how to force parents to quit smoking, the narrator takes his audience through a myriad of hilarious antics that feel simultaneously relatable and wholly his own. - Independent Book Review
Duning's ability to intersect narrative stories with bigger picture opportunities for reflection creates a literary, absorbing novel that will appeal whether readers are attracted to a coming-of-age saga, a reflection on bygone years, a narrative of family and friendship changes, or its Southern atmosphere.- Midwest Book Review
In Lawton, Tennessee, the truth of growing up rarely fits neatly inside a Christmas newsletter.
Tim Duning's Lawton Passage follows Liam, a boy raised in his ancestral country home built in the 1840s, as he adjusts to small-town rituals, and the quiet pressures of Southern life during the 1960s and '70s. Through thefts and schoolyard hijinks, swimming pool accidents, séances, paper routes, and first loves, Liam navigates a childhood and adolescence shaped by faith, family, and friendship-always measuring the perfection his father presents against the messy realities he experiences.
From the explosive humor of sabotaged cigarettes to the tragedies of peer loss, the memoir captures the grit, grief, and laughter of growing up in a town that refuses to stay small. Forty years later, Liam returns to Lawton, tracing the echoes of his past, realizing that home and family live most vividly in stories, not land. Lawton Passage is a poignant, funny, and deeply honest meditation on legacy, memory, and the Southern art of storytelling.
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