About this item
In the middle of his senior year at the Blackburne School in Virginia, Matthias Glass's roommate and best friend Fritz Davenport runs off into the woods after the two boys have an argument--and vanishes without a trace. Ever since, Matthias has felt responsible, thinking that their fight, about a betrayal of the school's honor code, led to Fritz's disappearance. A decade later, after an early triumph with his first novel, followed by too much partying and too little work, Matthias realizes he has stalled out and become a failure as a writer, a boyfriend, a man. So when he is offered a job at Blackburne as an English teacher, he sees it as a chance to put his life back together. But once on campus, Matthias gets swiftly drawn into the past and is driven to find out what happened to Fritz. Along the way he must reckon with Fritz's complicated and powerful Washington, D.C., family and the shocking death of a student--and begin to understand his own place in the privileged world of Blackburne. In the spirit of film noir, Shadow of the Lions takes plenty of dark, surprising twists--it's a thriller, but also a moving debut that is as much about the mystery as it is about the redemption of a broken friendship and a lost soul.
About the Author
Christopher Swann is a novelist and high school English teacher. A graduate of Washington and Lee University, he earned an M.A. in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Ph.D. in creative writing from Georgia State University. He lives with his wife and two sons in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is the English department chair at Holy Innocents' Episcopal School. SHADOW OF THE LIONS, his debut novel, was a finalist for the 2018 Townsend Prize for Fiction, and Chris was a finalist for a Georgia Author of the Year award as well. SHADOW OF THE LIONS was also long listed for the 2018 Southern Book Prize and named one of Southern Living's Best Southern Books of the Year in 2017. His second novel, NEVER TURN BACK, has been called "an extraordinarily compulsive read" in a starred review from Booklist and "a wild, compelling ride from beginning to end" by Kirkus Reviews. It has also been listed as one of Amazon's Best Books of October 2020. Chris is currently working on a third book, due out in 2021.Learn more at https://christopherswann.com
