Sooley

Name: Sooley
Author: John Grisham
ISBN: 9780385547710

by John Grisham

368 pages2021Random House Digital Inc.ISBN 9780385547710

Fiction

About this book

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • John Grisham is at the top of his game in this novel of a raw, young basketball player with big dreams—and even bigger challenges off the court. “Grisham is about as good a storyteller as we’ve got.”—The New York Times Book Review Samuel “Sooley” Sooleymon is just seventeen years old when he and his South Sudanese teammates come to the United States to compete in a basketball tournament. The opportunity to be scouted by college coaches is a dream come true. Though he is an amazing athlete, his technical game needs work. And then Sooley receives devastating news from home: as a result of the civil war raging across South Sudan, his father is dead, his sister is missing, and his mother and two younger brothers are in a refugee camp. Moved by his story, the coach of North Carolina Central offers him a scholarship. Sooley moves to Durham, enrolls in classes, and prepares to sit out his freshman season. But Sooley has a fierce determination to improve. He works tirelessly on his game, and soon he’s dominating in practice. With the Central team losing and plagued by injuries, Sooley is called off the bench. But how far can he take his team? And will success allow him to save his family?

Publication Details

Publisher: Random House Digital Inc.
Published: 2021
Pages: 368
ISBN: 9780385547710
Language: en

About John Grisham

Long before his name became synonymous with the modern legal thriller, he was working 60-70 hours a week at a small Southaven, Mississippi, law practice, squeezing in time before going to the office and during courtroom recesses to work on his hobby—writing his first novel. Born on February 8, 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to a construction worker and a homemaker, John Grisham as a child dreamed of being a professional baseball player. Realizing he didn’t have the right stuff for a pro career, he shifted gears and majored in accounting at Mississippi State University. After graduating from law school at Ole Miss in 1981, he went on to practice law for nearly a decade in Southaven, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigation. In 1983, he was elected to the state House of Representatives and served until 1990. One day at the DeSoto County courthouse, Grisham overheard the harrowing testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim and was inspired to start a novel exploring what would have happened if the girl’s father had murdered her assailants. Getting up at 5 a.m. every day to get in several hours of writing time before heading off to work, Grisham spent three years on A Time to Kill and finished it in 1987. Initially rejected by many publishers, it was eventually bought by Wynwood Press, who gave it a modest 5,000 copy printing and published it in June 1988. That might have put an end to Grisham’s hobby. However, he had already begun his next book, and it would quickly turn that hobby into a new full-time career—and spark one of publishing’s greatest success stories. The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on another novel, the story of a hotshot young attorney lured to an apparently perfect law firm that was not what it appeared. When he sold the film rights to The Firm to Paramount Pictures for $600,000, Grisham suddenly became a hot property among publishers, and book rights were bought by Doubleday. Spending 47 weeks