The Caterpillar Club is about a cantankerous WWII veteran and widower with early stage Alzheimer’s who enters an assisted living facility under protest. He immediately creates havoc at the center before leading an escape with four elderly female “groupies” that has an unanticipated life altering effect on the five senior renegades.
The lead character and hero, Seymour Levine, 82, is haunted with survivor guilt involving a ghost of his past, a fellow paratrooper he failed to save. The novel toggles back and forth between the years 1944 and 2006 as it is narrated from the perspective of his dead wartime comrade, Private Billy Flynn, who is literally the novel’s “ghost writer.”
This often humorous, sometimes poignant and altogether heartfelt novel was inspired by the author’s professional work and the heroism of his two uncles, both combat pilots in World War II.
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