Thorn Tree

Daniel is in his late sixties and lives quietly in a converted guest cottage in the Hollywood Hills. He is a legendary artist, known chiefly for Thorn Tree, a huge welded scrap metal sculpture he built in the Mojave desert in the 1970s. The work grew out of a tragedy. Building it kept him alive and brought him a brief, reluctant fame in the art world.

His neighbor is Celia, a charismatic but fragile actress who found fame young in a popular television series and nearly lost everything after a run of bad decisions. A new film with a notorious director may revive her career. A single mother, she leaves her young son Dean for weeks at a time with her father, Jack, who moves into her house while she is on location. Jack and Daniel begin a tentative friendship, and Dean starts visiting Daniel's cottage. But something about Jack is not right. He is unsettling and oddly intimate, prone to flashes of anger yet given to philosophizing, and he is not the harmless grandfather he appears to be.

The novel moves between the idealism and darkness of the late 1960s and the glossy celebrity world of present-day Los Angeles. The Grateful Dead, Charles Manson and other cults figure in the backdrop, along with secrets that Jack and Daniel have kept for fifty years. It explores the aftershocks of that era and the link between trauma and the urge to create.