Safe as Houses

''A gay novel about family values'' (Edmund White), Safe as Houses is the story of Allen Pasztory and his family -- the family he was born to and the family he has stumbled into and embraced. His loving parents, raised in the inhumane surroundings of a state school for the deaf. His sister, bilingual like himself, pursuing ordinariness as if it were possible, and her son Kit, disowned by his father. Allen's husband in all but name, brave, solid, scared, Jeremy; Jeremy's ex-wife Ruth, involved despite her best intentions; and their son, Toby, precocious and ferociously loyal. Ill and likely to die before his time, Allen tells himself the stories he needs to survive, stories that may explain his life to the boys he's raised, for ''your life is never only your own story, and what you don't know for sure you must invent, using all the clues you can gather.''