Set in the early 1950s and encompassing the vast drama of the North American continent, the novel keeps its readers focused on the four main characters. The Lincoln Highway is an old-fashioned road trip, as well as an old-fashioned buddy story, where good people help each other. His novels are page-turners, but it is their moral backbone, personified in his male protagonists – in The Lincoln Highway, Emmett Watson in his first novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, Count Alexander Rostov – that ensures we are left with not just an entertaining read but also the happy feeling that somewhere in the world there are people for whom, no matter how dark the times in which they live, or how bad the people they share them with, goodness will eventually win out.Īmerican authors have made great mileage out of the road trip genre – Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, come to mind – but in a country whose persona is dominated by the frontier thesis, Americans have always been on the lookout for terrains to cross and journeys to make. The success of Amor Towles’s novel The Lincoln Highway may just result in a record number of new members.Īmor Towles has a wonderful talent for writing reassuring words in troubled times. Established in 1913, fading away in the 1940s and reactivated in 1992, the Lincoln Highway Association is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the United States’ first transcontinental road for cars, the Lincoln Highway. It would be interesting to know how many members the Lincoln Highway Association has. Spanning just 10 days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters and themes.This new novel from Amor Towles is a road trip across the United States of the 1950s.

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.

But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his 8-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew.

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. Towles is back with his third novel, “The Lincoln Highway.” Amor Towles is the author of the New York Times bestsellers “Rules of Civility” and “A Gentleman in Moscow.” The two novels have collectively sold more than 4 million copies and have been translated into more than 30 languages.

Towles new book