"In this real-life detective story, Mark Matousek takes us on a search for his father, who left the family when Mark was four, a year after the birth of Mark's younger sister. For years, he had pushed all memories of James Matousek aside, insisting to anyone who asked him that being fatherless and the only male in a family of four women was irrelevant to the man he grew up to be. When, years later, a friend dared him to hire a private detective to track down his father, Matousek took the challenge.".

"The Boy He Left Behind is the story of Mark Matousek's search - not only for the stranger who fathered him, but also for his own sense of self. It is a poignant account of a boy's troubled youth, and a meditation on intimacy, identity, and mortality. It is also a portrait of Matousek's mother, Ida, whose attempt to find love and a place where she belonged led from one disaster to the next.".

"As Matousek follows his hard-boiled detective from one dead-end lead to the next hopeful possibility, we watch him begin to come to terms with the inevitable uncertainties of being human, the tenacious bonds of family, and the high, sometimes heartbreaking, cost of love."--BOOK JACKET.