november 2021

Well well well. Amor Towles has nailed it again with his new release The Lincoln Highway. It's ticking the boxes and all the feels for me as its about a road trip, woo hoo,  and set in the 1950's, an era that like a lot of you, I am obsessed with. Such in depth characters that once again, just like A Gentleman in Moscow, you really feel like you are on the journey with these two brothers, dare I say friends even.  A sure fire winner and a def contender for next months Book of the month end of year favourite 2021 read. 

Official blurb - Bursting with life, charm and unforgettable characters, The Lincoln Highway is an extraordinary journey through 1950s America from a master storyteller. Emmett returns home to pick-up his little brother Billy, tie-up his late father’s estate and get out of town for good. Since leaving the Kansas youth facility where he’s served time, Emmett has wanted one thing, to give them both a fresh start: and that means heading out to the sparkling west. Young, precocious Billy has plans of his own, to get to San Francisco, where he believes their long-estranged mother is waiting for them. However, as soon as they've loaded Emmett’s bright blue Studebaker with their few belongings, trouble arrives and brings its sidekick in the form of Duchess and Woolly, two runaways from the very facility Emmett just left behind him. Insatiable Duchess and his devoted, but slow companion Woolly soon wreck Billy's plan to get onto the open road, one well-intentioned blunder at a time. Each young man sees this journey as his chance to pursue his dreams, settle scores and find riches. And a simple journey quickly becomes a dazzling odyssey filled with obstacles, villains and ruses fit only for heroes to overcome.  Amor Towles says: ‘As a novelist, I like to mix it up. So, while Rules of Civility describes a year in the life of a 25-year-old woman who’s about to climb the socio-economic ladder of New York, A Gentleman in Moscow spans three decades with a Russian aristocrat who’s lost everything. My new novel, The Lincoln Highway, is about three eighteen-year-old boys and an eight-year-old boy on a journey from Nebraska to New York City in 1954—the whole story lasting just ten days. While I think The Lincoln Highway will offer readers many of the same satisfactions of my first two novels, I hope it will provide them not simply a new set of characters, settings, and themes, but a very different reading experience.’ Venetia Butterfield, Managing Director of Cornerstone, says: ‘The Lincoln Highway is a brilliant, fascinating, charming and hypnotic journey of a book. It’s playfully Homeric with glorious flashes of Steinbeck but yet it is an utterly fresh tale of kinship and adventure. As with A Gentleman In Moscow the characters become fond friends and exist long after you finish the last page.’
BUY THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY BY AMORE TOWLES