Our Boys

When the star players on a high school football team are accused of violence by another student, their secrets--and the secrets of their parents--threaten to shatter their entire community in a gripping novel of race, class, and privilege from the author of Members Only.

Vikram Shastri has always been a good kid. He’s got a 4.6 GPA, listens to his parents, barely hits the parties, and is on track for a fancy college. But when he gets the chance to play on his high school football team, his world suddenly starts to shift. Basking in their recent victory, Vikram and his teammates Diego and MJ attend a party at an abandoned house in the Southern California foothills, located right below three ancient caves. They find themselves lost in the dark of night in one of the caves, carried away by male bravado, with a classmate who has annoyed them for years.

But when the kid emerges with injuries that prove to be more serious than the all-star boys intended, they are suspended for the rest of the season, and the boys’ parents are brought in to manage the situation. As the parents try to protect their boys, they are also managing their own complicated family and professional lives. While the parents work with, and against, one another to figure out the truth about that night, the boys must come to terms with how much of their own secrets they’re willing to reveal to clear their names.

Insightful and deeply human, Our Beautiful Boys is about race and class, parents trying to raise good boys in our fraught times, and the conflict we find when all of these slam together. It’s about the kids inside each parent and the games the world makes each of us play.

Sameer Pandya is the author of the novel Members Only, a finalist for the California Book Award and an NPR best book of the year, and the story collection The Blind Writer, longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. His cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including The Atlantic, Salon, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN. A recipient of the PEN/Civitella Fellowship, he is currently an associate professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.