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When Howard and Julia Lament adopt Will, a baby secretly switched at birth in a bizarre hospital debacle, it marks the beginning of a journey that takes them from Northern Rhodesia in the 1950s to the Persian Gulf, England and suburban, Seventies America, as they search for their place in the world. Howard is an engineer and dreamer, obsessed by the conveyance of liquids through valves. Julia is a woman of fiery spirit and an artist, who is constantly called upon to reinvent her family’s life and her own. Forced by his younger, anarchic twin brothers to question his place in the family, Will struggles to find a sense of his own identity through the characters he meets en route – from Ruth, his first love in Africa, who carries around a biscuit tin lid to admire her reflection to Dawn Snedecker, the lisping intellectual who breaks his heart in America. It is Will, the adopted Lament, who is destined to hold the family together.

Through the Laments’ restlessness, their responses to adversity, and especially their unwieldy love for one another, George Hagen draws a picture of every family that is funny, tragic, hopeful and true.

George studied film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has had many jobs: movie theatre doorman, carpenter, selling newspapers, picking up the guard dog’s droppings at a lumberyard, baling hay on a farm, janitor, executive secretary, screenwriter, and stay-at-home dad.

George had always yearned to be a writer. During college he had read a short story by Delmore Schwartz entitled In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. It was about a young man who dreams that he is watching his parents’ courtship in Brooklyn in 1909, on a silent movie screen. When he recognises all their conceits and the troubles that lie ahead in their marriage he stands up in the audience, urging his parents not to go through with it, but, of course, he cannot stop the movie from playing its course. George says, ‘This story astounded me because it told so much all at once. It was about the American immigrant experience, the complexities of love, and marriage, and the paralysis of regret. These were all themes that fascinated me, that I had never seen addressed together with such insight and brilliance. This story made me want to writer.’

The Laments started with an episode that had really happened to him as a baby just after he was born. ‘I was a surrogate baby for another mother in the ward whose child was in an incubator. So every day I would spend some time with her, and some time with my mother.’

George is now working on a period novel about an emotionally paralyzed father and his son’s attempts to gain his love.

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