Kanada by Richard Ford

Fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons has his comfortable childhood shattered when his parents’ involvement in a desperate bank robbery leads to arrest and abandonment, forcing him away from home and into the care of distant relatives; alone and adrift, he must learn to survive in a harsher adult world. The narrative follows his quiet, often harrowing coming-of-age as he confronts moral ambiguity, violence, and the long fallout of his parents’ choices, slowly forging a wary independence and a clearer, if uneasy, understanding of who he has become.