Longboat Key: A Novel

by John Zeugner

Publisher:

Resource Publications

, 2020

A simple tale of real-estate greed, student sex trafficking, environmental chicanery, small-business deception, and landmark demolition, Longboat Key tracks the unraveling of Charlie Dyer, Jimmy Faneuf, John Spradlin, Clementine Peverill, and other Floridians, as love, or something, alters them.

Praise for Longboat Key

“Just when you thought that Florida in the late fifties was all late-Deco, well-meaning snowbirds, and honest speculation in blameless retirement homes, Zeugner puts on display a dirty-laundry list of the blemishes that made post-war Florida a far cry from pastel structures and water-ski gardens, Esther Williams style. This is a world—an unwitting hell?—where shady real-estate Ponzi schemes run parallel to the fakery of life itself, of just being. It is a last outpost, humanity’s sorry land’s end, metaphorized in the haunting wartime memory of the delusional beached soldier in the Philippines, who struggled uselessly to stuff his gut back into his own body, in order to become whole again.”

—Lee Fontanella, Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Arts and Andrew Carnegie Centenary Professor for Scotland



“Set in the 1960s, John Zeugner’s latest book, Longboat Key, is a great insight into a time gone by in Florida. In those days, the people who came to this tiny island off Sarasota were each about seventeen degrees off center, and John has brought them to life for us to enjoy! The characters are real (I knew most of them) and John manages to capture their very zany, hard-to-believe-if-it weren’t-true personalities. When the story comes to an end, you will wish it could go on and on—just to see what happens next!”

—John Lilly, former CEO, The Pillsbury Company

Product Details

• Title : Longboat Key: A Novel
• Author: Zeugner, John
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Publication Date: 2020
• ISBN: 9781532696794

About the Author

John Zeugner lived on Longboat Key, Florida for seven years in the 1960s. He has published eight books of fiction and, decades ago, received a National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Grant.