Saving Willard

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A jukebox. A coin. One hundred songs. Each one is a door.

Carson City, Nevada. Summer of 1992. A twelve-year-old boy arrives at his grandparents' house to spend the summer while his grandmother dies. His grandfather—a man who pulls weeds from dawn to noon without stopping and has never spoken about his past—keeps a 1953 Seeburg jukebox polished to a mirror shine in the corner of the living room.

Nobody plays it. Until the boy drops a coin in the slot.

Each song carries him backward—into the Catholic orphanage where his grandfather was abandoned at five, the streets of San Francisco where a twelve-year-old runaway built a newspaper operation from two pennies and a sardine crate, the trenches of North Africa where a young soldier forced his shaking hands to stop, and the Hollywood studios where a man with no education turned wartime demolition into a craft that kept every actor on his set safe for forty years.

He goes in believing he can save the boy his grandfather once was.

He is wrong about who is saving whom.

SAVING WILLARD is a novel about survival, quiet heroism, and the things grandfathers carry—told in spare, luminous prose that smells of sage and sounds like a jukebox playing in an empty room.

For readers of The Glass Castle, A Man Called Ove, All the Light We Cannot See, and A River Runs Through It.