WINNERS

Shane McCarthy is a Berkeley-educated chimney sweep, plying his trade in the mercurial atmosphere of dot-com bubble San Francisco circa 1999. His wife, Lou, glides in and out, obsessed with making her own start-up fortune. Outside of home and work, Shane's life revolves around basketball games at the Firehouse, an asphalt refuge where he plays the game with other 30-somethings, reveling in the physicality of crashing bodies. When Sam, a 20-year-old who has penetrated this sanctum of men fighting early middle age, disappears from the weekly games, Shane decides to search for him. The hunt begins to fill the gaping void in Shane's daily existence; sandwiched between the encroaching nouveaux riches as they transform his beloved city into a luxurious playground and his ambitious, distant wife, he ventures into a gritty, other San Francisco. Here he meets Sam's mother, Debra, tough and tortured and lost in the vortex of violence that plagues her inner-city neighborhood. The two slowly feint and jab at one another, trying to gain trust and information. A puzzling interruption arrives in the person of an enigmatic venture capitalist acquaintance of Lou's who latches onto Shane and drags him out for a night of slumming, but fortunately his presence causes only minor confusion. Martin's novel is a well-crafted, unsentimental examination of loneliness and the lengths to which some people will go in order to connect with another human being. Agent, Jay Mandel at the William Morris Agency. (Feb. 14)