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    An Honorable Profession: A Novel
    An Honorable Profession: A Novel
    An Honorable Profession: A Novel
    Ebook523 pages12 hours

    An Honorable Profession: A Novel

    By John L'Heureux

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    About this ebook

    A New York Times Notable Book of a young teacher and the scandal that could destroy him. “A combination interior odyssey and intense thriller” (Publishers Weekly).
     
    John L’Heureux is one of our most authoritative and compelling novelists, and An Honorable Profession is a “splendid novel” realized “superbly well” about an ordinary New England school where a young teacher’s life is about to undergo the most serious of tests (The Star-Ledger).
     
    Miles Bannon works hard and strives to be fair; he enjoys his popularity with students—a bit too much, sometimes—but overall he is a good man. When he witnesses a group of students picking on one boy in the shower after football practice, he is suddenly forced to balance his responsibility for the situation with the unexpectedly intimate glimpse he now has of them. And when the victim begins to cling to him in the face of his own father’s rejection, Miles finds it perhaps too welcome a feeling. Then comes an accusation of impropriety that will destroy his career—and transform his life, and who he thought he was, forever.
     
    “Brilliant and complex . . . A deeply ambitious novelist . . . who isn’t afraid of dealing with dark themes and what it means to be fully human.” —Robert Ward, The New York Time Book Review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9781555846800
    An Honorable Profession: A Novel
    Author

    John L'Heureux

    John L'Heureux was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He spent seventeen years as a Jesuit priest, after which he worked as an editor at the Atlantic; and for more than thirty years taught American literature and creative writing at Stanford, where he was the longtime director of the writing program. His stories appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Harper's. He was the author of twenty-three books, including the novels The Beggar's Pawn, The Medici Boy, and The Shrine at Altamira; and the short-story collections Desires and Comedians. He lived with his wife in northern California until his death in 2019.

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    • 4/5
      Miles Bannon is a successful English teacher, know affectionately as Milo by his students he is the most popular teacher in the school. But when a boys' initiation prank in the sports changing rooms goes wrong, it sets in motion a series of events that look to ruin his reputation and his beloved career. Miles does what he can to help the victim of the prank, but the boy, distanced by his father and initially withdrawn, develops a crush for Miles, leading to confusion for Miles, and eventually accusations of improper behaviour on his part.An Honorable Profession chronicles the events from the prank to the end of the school year and Miles' final realisations about himself. We follow him as he deals not only with the troubled boy and the rumours and accusations, but also his dying mother, his clinging and troubled girlfriend and the voracious Diane, who heads his English Department.It is a story of eventual personal triumph over adversity, and makes for a satisfying read. I found myself switching from admiring Miles to almost despairing for him when on the occasion he makes some less than wise decisions. But finally one has to admire him for coming through it all one way or another.

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    An Honorable Profession - John L'Heureux

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