All tagged 1950s New York

The Lincoln Highway

There are many ways to tell a story and many ways to construct a hero. Amor Towles’s most recent novel The Lincoln Highway (2021) certainly plays with how a story might unfold and who readers identify as its star(s). His previous two novels focus on specific protagonists and take place over different time periods—Rules of Civility (2011) is an older woman’s retelling of one year in her life thirty years prior and A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) is one man’s story told chronologically over the course of thirty years. The Lincoln Highway takes an altogether different approach both in terms of characters and telling.

Horse

Geraldine Brooks’s most recent novel, Horse (2022), threads the lives of various characters existing across 150 years of American history into a powerful story. The three storylines braid together as the narrative builds; and it is a horse that binds the strands to one another. As she has did in People of the Book, artifact and historical characters speak to the lives of modern ones and a tapestry of individuals and subplots work their way toward mutual resolution.