Description
Book SynopsisA 115-year-old man lays on his deathbed as the 2016 US election results arrive, and revisits his life in this moving story of love, fatherhood, and the American century from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler...
Trade ReviewA stirring portrait of a man and his times... If Butler examines with unashamed seriousness the old chestnut of what it means to be a man, his central conceit adds vital levity, and there's formal invention, too, as he segues seamlessly between the threads of Sam's life without ever losing the reader. A fine novel * Daily Mail *
This marvellous novel has just what you want from a fictional centenarian memoir: the art that conceals art, giving meaning to the story while maintaining the illusion of a long life lived in all its messiness * Telegraph *
Engaging... A poignant meditation on the circle of life, the wonder we all feel as it slips away * Minneapolis Star Tribune *
With two dozen remarkably imaginative and empathic fiction titles to his credit, Butler brings preternatural attunement to the spiraling of the mind and ardently honed artistry to this exceptionally nuanced, tender, funny, tragic, and utterly transfixing portrait of a man reflecting on more than a century's worth of horror and wonder * Booklist (starred review) *
Breathtaking... An honest, poignant reckoning of what it means to gaze unblinkingly at our own failings and to find transcendence * Historical Novel Society *
