Towles’ new novel ranges further geographically - from Nebraska’s farmland to New York’s Adirondacks by way of some of New York City’s iconic sites - but its action-packed plot is compressed into just 10 days. Mostly confined to a single setting - Moscow’s luxurious Metropol Hotel - it spanned 32 years under Stalin’s grim rule. His much-loved second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), incorporated nods toward the great Russian writers and shades of Eloise at the Plaza and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Scott Fitzgerald and its title from George Washington’s Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation.

His first novel, Rules of Civility (2011), set among social strivers in New York City in 1936, took its inspiration from F. Again, one of the ideas Towles explores is how evil can be offset by decency and kindness on any rung of the socio-economic ladder. Like his first two novels, The Lincoln Highway is elegantly constructed and compulsively readable. But hitch onto this delightful tour de force and you’ll be pulled straight through to the end, helpless against the inventive exuberance of Towles’ storytelling. If this book were set today, their constant detours and U-turns would send GPS into paroxysms of navigational recalculations. Amor Towles’ new Great American Road Novel tails four boys - three 18-year-olds who met in a juvenile reformatory, plus a brainy 8-year-old - as they set out from Nebraska in June, 1954, in an old Studebaker in pursuit of a better future. An absorbing, exhilarating ride, The Lincoln Highway is a novel as vivid, sweeping, and moving as readers have come to expect from Towles’s work. Spanning ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel is a multilayered tale of misadventure and self-discovery, populated by an eclectic cast of characters, from drifters who make their home riding the rails and larger-than-life vaudevillians to the aristocrats of the Upper East Side. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction- to the City of New York. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’sintention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew.īut when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the workforce have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. In June 1954, 18-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served 15 months for involuntary manslaughter.

The lincoln highway a novel reviews