Somewhere between the Bronx shoreline and the tip of Manhattan is Turnaway, a heretofore uncharted island inhabited solely by an elderly German-Jewish doctor and his young ward, Elias Hutchinson, who fancies himself to be the last surviving descendant of a decimated Native American tribe. When a weekend sailor shipwrecks on their beach, this fanciful kingdom is subtly disrupted, altering its peaceful balance of man, nature, and dreams.

In Jesse Browner's exquisite Turnaway, innocence and youth are explored in elegiac, poignant, and always surprising ways. When Elias travels to midtown, it is a journey of peril and temptation, with the love he finds there ultimately undermining his gentle faith in his own invulnerability. How he reconciles his fantasies, his psychic inventions, with the harsh cruelties of contemporary life makes for a heartbreaking and powerful tale.

Replete with fascinating historical details about New York's colonial past and containing a wealth of Native American sagas filtered through Elias's splendid imagination, Turnaway is a novelistic tour de force - fresh, wholly original, and unforgettable.