Shawn Stewart Ruff laughs when I congratulate him on Finlater, his first novel. “More like my fifth,” he says. A voracious reader and prolific writer, Ruff wrote the preliminary draft of the book in about six weeks. “It was a big, sloppy mess,” he admits. “It had to be rewritten 10 or 15 times.”

The result is the finely tuned story of Cliffy, a 13-year-old African-American boy from the housing projects who discovers his burgeoning homosexuality with Noah, a middle-class Jewish classmate from the right side of the inner-city tracks. Cast against the backdrop of tumultuous 1970s Cincinnati, Ruff’s portrayal of the ravages of first love is rooted in history and place. The era’s race and class dynamics -- which Ruff experienced growing up in a project adjacent to the Findlater Gardens of the title -- are mirrored in the two boys’ families: Cliffy’s father is consistently absent and extraordinarily violent; Noah’s is plagued by mental illness and a shocking sexual secret of his own. When Cliffy meets Noah in junior high school, their connection is immediate. “I wanted to explore under what circumstances at that time a child could discover sex,” Ruff says. “It had to be with someone so different from Cliffy, pulling him out of his world into a whole other vista.”

Despite the pervasive heartbreak of the novel, Finlater is ultimately a love story, if an unsentimental one. “Hard love is mostly the kind of love I’ve known,” says Ruff. “And I’m not interested in a ‘happily ever after’ story.”

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