THE BEGGAR'S PAWN

The final book by the noted novelist, short story writer, and teacher tells the story of an affable stranger whose appeals for money gradually upend the lives of an academic's family.

David and Maggie Holliss are an ordinary married couple about to ease into a comfortable, well-earned retirement while tending to three middle-aged children with whom they share an edgy relationship of love and resentment. Reginald Parker enters their lives when he saves their dog from being run over by a truck, and when asked how they can possibly thank him, he replies with a request for the loan of two hundred dollars. They lend it to him, gladly, and thus begins what will become for them and their family a nightmare that moves from comic resignation to stark tragedy. In THE BEGGAR'S PAWN, L'Heureux explores the strains of marriage, the nature of trust, the limits of love, and the inevitability of fate.

John L'Heureux was a novelist, short story writer, and poet, and taught at Stanford for several decades, heading the Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship for many of them. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker and other publications, and his novels include A Woman Run Mad, The Shrine at Altamira, and The Medici Boy. He served in the Jesuit priesthood before publishing his first novel, Tight White Collar in 1972. He died in 2019.

John L'Heureux had a late flowering in his career. In the year before his death in April of 2019, The New Yorker published three of his stories, and a collection of his short stories was published by A Public Space in December 2019. His moving essay on his physician-assisted suicide after years of suffering from Parkinson's appeared on the The New Yorker's website after his death.

THE BEGGAR'S PAWN will include eulogies to him as a teacher and an inspiration from L'Heureux's well-known former writing students.