Laura loves her daughter more than anything in the world. But nine-year-old Autumn is being bullied. Laura feels helpless. When Autumn fails to return home from school one day, Laura goes looking for her. She finds a crowd of older children taunting her little girl. In the heat of the moment, Laura makes a terrible choice. A choice that will have devastating consequences for her and her daughter ...

Equal parts childhood memoir and literary thriller, Whipping Boy chronicles Allen Kurzweil's search for his twelve-year-old nemesis, a bully named Cesar Augustus. The obsessive inquiry, which spans some forty years, takes Kurzweil all over the world, from a Swiss boarding school (where he endures horrifying cruelty) to the slums of Manila, from the Park Avenue boardroom of the world's largest law firm to a federal prison camp in Southern California....