​I was led to this book by the ‘bestseller’ hype around previous novels by the author and the fact that I could download it and try it for free.

After knowing Leo for a relatively short time Alice has married Leo. The couple move to a well-to-do private neighbourhood where fellow residents deem friendly enough. However, we learn that one of Alice’s former neighbours – Nina Maxwell – died in suspicious circumstances, apparently killed by her husband.

Alice feels uneasy about both this and experiences anxiety in her own home which should have provided the stable existence the newly married couple have been striving for. A degree of jeopardy is injected early in the story regarding Leo, which then spreads to other residents living in ‘The Circle’ as Alice becomes an increasingly driven amateur sleuth as she attempts to find out what really happened to Nina.

Having read that last paragraph back it sounds quite intriguing, doesn’t it? I did have my own suspicions about who really did commit the dastardly deed – which is why we read books like these isn’t it? I also guessed which of the talking heads was actually ‘The Therapist,’ with their observations being recorded anonymously at key parts of the story. 

I was wrong on both counts: my guesses and the nature of the book. There are certainly junctions in the text where the suspense is heightened, but these usually come after long stretches of mindless motorway reading. I think my main problem was that I didn’t really believe in Alice as an investigator, given that she seemed unable to work through some of the other characters’ nuances, went headfirst with a thread and then seemed to watch quite helplessly as that part of the plot’s cloth proceeded to unravel before her (and our) own eyes.

I found some of the characters two-dimensional when Alice was trying to make them more complex than they really were. I suppose their intended middle-class luvviness rendered them less worthy of our sympathy and thus also for Alice who so desperately wanted to live the same lifestyle as them. Wanted so much to be like them.

I have striven for character-led stories in my own fiction, but also tried to craft them such that, if you’re still there at the end, you will be satisfied or even surprised by their conclusion. I went to a playwriting course in Scarborough more than thirty years ago and learned that shaping the stage for the performers to act and speak on was as important as anything they subsequently did or said. If you didn’t believe in or care about the environment, you were going to become bored quickly. Even if you stuck with it, either a forensically well-planned or wildly surprising ending was essential for leaving you wanting more. In this particular case I didn’t.

I probably will download another book by this author, but the ‘bestseller’ hype so beloved of book marketeers has – like part of the hotel we were staying in all those years ago – once again fallen over the cliff of reason. Perhaps that was the edgiest thing about it.

I’ve been reading a number of thrillers and crime stories over the summer as well as some older ‘classics.’ So, quite a lot of reviews coming your way I’m afraid!

I hadn’t read anything by S.E. Lynes previously but was quickly involved with the plot and main characters. Will is a life coach, aiming to help put others’ lives back on track, while Jessica is a ‘career mother’ who relies on Will to keep everything up and running at home and, in particular, looking after their two young children.

An incident involving Will throws this arrangement up in the air and the pieces that come back to earth form a quite different structure to all their lives. A crack in their married relationship becomes a fissure and even as we will (!) them to try harder to fill the alarming gaps that quickly form, so the rift appears likely to become increasingly permanent.
There are, of course, two sides to any story such as this and we read into it what Will and Jessica independently believe is going on. As we gain more information from such insights, so the communications between the two of them become less and less effective, as sadness turns to anger and resolution.

Into this poisonous mix, and their mixed-up worlds, a new and entirely different character appears – apparently from a chance meeting in a pub. Ian Robbins is the kind of man who holds Will’s (and our) attention from the moment he strides on to the page. His is almost an exotic, parallel universe through which Will tries to make sense of what is happening to his marriage. However, although the lens of distance and objectivity may magnify certain aspects – bring them into relief – it might simultaneously be too narrow for him to see the much bigger picture.

After a pacy introduction, I did find the book a little repetitive throughout the middle section as the author tried to rack up the tension. I guess it’s a fine balance between keeping the suspense engine running and knowing when and how to press the accelerator. I also wasn’t entirely taken in by how the plot developed. However, I’ve read so many books lately where the final sprints have left me feeling well short of the winning post. The quality of the prose here certainly meant that I was always going to finish the race.

As a writer I’m always intrigued by the unexpected ‘what ifs’ as stable relationships in ‘ordinary’ situations face curve balls either of their own making or from left field: how ‘normal’ people handle adversity. I’ve started to explore this in the first three books of my new Inspector Harcourt Mystery series which were published on Amazon this week. I guess we all potentially face a ‘Chesil Beach’ moment in our lives, no matter how safe and secure we might be feeling, and confident in our planning for the long-term. I think that the author really captured the essence of this, even though it was probably less subtle than it could have been, given the rush towards a resolution.

I hadn’t read any books by Victoria Jenkins previously but have just downloaded another after reading Happily Married. 

​I read most of it in thirty-five-degree heat on the balcony of a hotel in Pune, India, where I was recently visiting family. The location could not have been much further away than the small farm in north Wales where the book is set, but additional heat was provided by this psychological thriller. 

The story centres on childhood sweethearts Jake and Natalie who are now married and running a small farm that they inherited from her parents. The inheritance undoubtedly shifted the equilibrium point of their relationship and now, facing familiar financial difficulties, it is only with the hard work of childhood and family friend, Tyler, that they can keep things moving forward. They have a young daughter – Elsie – who is the centre of Natalie’s world, perhaps less so Jake’s. One of the questions posed is whether she is simply spoilt or enjoys extra attention due to her ‘learning difficulties.’

To try to improve things financially, but despite Jake’s opposition, they let out one of the farmhouse bedrooms to the attractive Kara. This brings a good deal of pressure to bear on their marriage and the story centres on how this and Jake’s suspiciously secret actions are resolved.

As a psychological thriller, the first part of the story played to my unconscious bias and kept me involved, even as I dreaded each new page revealing a little more of what I – we – knew was going to happen. However, that all changed about halfway through. I rushed into the hotel room to tell my wife and son about the most amazing and unexpected plot twist which I hadn’t seen coming at all. I was very excited about what was to come and where the story was now heading.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think the second half of the book held up nearly so well and, as shadows announced the coming of evening, I wished the darkness to come would be as thrilling as I had expected it to be. A rather lame backstory failed to convince me of its authenticity, and everything seemed drawn out towards an inevitable end. I had found Kara entirely credible, to begin with; by the end, she was, for me, entirely incredible.

There, I have used ‘unexpected’ and ‘inevitable’ within two paragraphs of each other. The author was clearly trying to build up the tension and the suspense, but it was as though, after revealing the plot twist, that it was too much for her to handle. Instead of the sense of jeopardy becoming almost unbearable, it quickly flattened out to become too cosy and predictable for me. Others may well beg to differ.

I think it would have been far better to draw us in for longer and then spring the twist on us, say two-thirds from the end. I felt the author had too much time to play with in the whole second half of the book and I became bored as a result.

However, I have downloaded another book by Victoria Jenkins because, although I felt the structure and parts of this plot were flawed, I found the writing beautiful throughout. It was also intelligent and completely fooled me for quite a long time, which had nothing to do with the heat!

​We are often too quick to dismiss those on a different neural spectrum in a pejorative way, aren’t we? Words we use – as in The Maid by Nita Prose – include ‘odd’ and 'quirky,' sometimes even ‘rude.’ We assume that we are in the moral and verbal ascendancy and that such characters are somehow inferior to us because they behave differently, react differently or sometimes don’t even react at all. Those who are unable to pick up verbal and non-verbal clues as we do, without even thinking about the process going on ‘normally’ in our brains, are dismissed; made fun of via a range of hackneyed epithets around pork pies and the like.

Having a close acquaintance who is quite clearly somewhere ‘on the autism spectrum’ has enabled me to think twice before opening my mouth and making a quick, pithy judgement – usually to entertain others. However, I do not always remember to be kind, much to my shame. I suspect that Nita Prose had a muse for her Molly the Maid character. Perhaps, in writing this novel, she too is trying to make up for her own misunderstanding or deliberate non-understanding of such neurodiverse people. I hope that my greater efforts to appreciate the world that such people see, hear and speak to have helped me both as a writer and more importantly as a person out there in our largely unforgiving society.

To that end, I think I was more patient than many readers might be when encountering Molly and the immense detail with which she describes her world. Her late grandmother was clearly her moral compass early in life and that lady’s oft-repeated phrases are as signposts for Molly to follow. My personal favourite was: ‘Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.’

Many of us know, within our more developed powers of reasoning, that this might not be true, but if hope is both a catalyst and an elixir there are surely worse drugs. Molly is ridiculed, disliked or simply used by other members of staff at her hotel. Gradually we realise that she is not the pushover they all think she is; she just needs time to process unknown or unexpected situations (such as finding a hotel guest dead in his room) properly. Thankfully she has friends such as the lovely doorman, Mr Preston, and his resourceful daughter who act like guardian angels (which is when we are reminded that this is a work of fiction).

Other crimes around immigration are touched on and, as with the principal murder, greed proves to be the main motivator. Molly’s character is held up as a mirror to such selfishness as her simple and selfless understanding of what is right and what is wrong informs her every decision at each crossroads she arrives at (although she is not entirely blameless in some of the actions she takes, which I felt gave the third dimension to her character we could identify with).

I was much more interested in how her perception of the villains in her midst would play out rather than the mystery of the murder itself, though there were some interesting twists there too. I did feel that, in urging us to understand her through urging her to understand us, there were too many two-dimensional characters in the book – mere placeholders for the dish being served up to us.

This is the first in a series of Molly the Maid mysteries, with The Mystery Guest due to be published in the UK shortly. I’m not sure that I would read another in the series as the character is so important to me and I already get it. Different situations at different times wouldn’t really add to my enjoyment, knowing that, truthfully, Molly’s character may learn from previous events but not in the way they might teach us, going forwards. Molly doesn’t have the neural luxuries that most of us take for granted; at least in this book those who take her for granted have a rude awakening – and that should cheer souls everywhere.

They say that you should ‘write about what you know’ don’t they? They, being largely people who don’t write.

Certainly, it is very frustrating when descriptions are sketchy and unforgiveable when ‘truisms’ are proved to be incorrect. In a world with so much information at our fingertips – if our brains haven’t already absorbed it from all the media touchpoints which we now encounter every second of the day – it is so easy to check facts before those handy online proofreaders suggest grammatical changes.

I have read most of Ian McEwan’s novels, usually held in awe by his outstanding prose and mesmerised by the often-forensic detail into which he goes to draw his characters, their locations, and their actions.

Lessons takes us through the life learnings of Roland Baines, from his upbringing in North Africa through an intimate yet also rather existential boarding school encounter with a piano teacher, a doomed marriage to a German writer, a second marriage to an old friend – also doomed – and on to a prospective ending where his granddaughter can still teach him a thing or two.

These are the bare bones of it and, yes, they really are bare, aren’t they? The words do not do justice to the memoir that absorbs us and carries us along, backwards and forwards against a background of world events I can relate to almost entirely, the timed bookends of this life story being very close to my own. We learn about desire, but also abuse, Friendship but also selfishness. The joy of a son – Lawrence – who is as rootless as his father.

Yes, all of life is in here and as we read about Roland’s lessons, so we understand him better – always relating back to the classical pianist he might have been; the person he might have developed into and the life he might have led instead of this one. Would that have been so absorbing though? Would we have willed him on in the same way, felt his regret and his lack of self-fulfilment? Of course not. This is a book of what might have been; a life in which learning lessons may not lead to the passing of any exams. But, thankfully, it’s never too late to try.

McEwan has certainly done his research, fed it into the process diagram at the top and converted it into a wealth of wealthy words. Almost too many words. There were times in the book when I wanted to say out loud ‘Ian (not Roland) I hear you. I know that you know what you know.’ I would have once found it intimidating to be faced by such a web of sophistication, but I was drawn into it willingly and captivated by it. The story worked but could have been much shorter and still been just as effective.

My favourite of his remains On Chesil Beach for its simple and tragic beauty. I do wonder if sometimes authors no longer trust to such simple devices to be effective and need to embellish their reputations as much as their stories. Ian McEwan certainly has no need to do this as one of the outstanding conveyors of time and place in a generation.
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Having said all of this, if you’re not prepared to go on life’s long journey, your own story may be all the shorter, physically and philosophically, for it.

​Ahead of the release of a new book in the Thursday Murder Club series, I thought I’d better catch up on book three. I wasn’t entirely sure after the first book but found that Richard and I had really got into the swing of things by the time I came to this one. The writing is confident, and we race along with each sentence. Of each of the three books so far, I found this to be the closest to unputdownable. 

As with any series of fiction books, it is the resident characters that draw us in and back to their previous stories. We get to know them better and, although there are welcome reminders of previous encounters, we can move forward with confidence, confident that we understand where they’re coming from and that they are, inevitably, in control of us as much as the other characters they encounter as each plot unravels.

Having said that, I did feel that they had become a little one-dimensional in The Bullet that Missed – almost caricatures of themselves. I also wasn’t sure about relationships breaking out everywhere. It seemed too sudden; too all-encompassing somehow.

The plot is as lunatic as ever, with a journalist having seemingly been murdered while investigating a VAT fraud and a ‘Viking’ and ex-KGB officer being introduced over a cryptocurrency dispute which, very surprisingly, Joyce has also embraced. I felt that the plotting and pacing were better than in the previous two books, and it felt good to escape even as I was caught up in the intrigue.

Joyce is, as ever, the character who makes us laugh out loud by saying things that are clearly absurd but endearingly so, with elements of truth in all that we do and say and think in real life. I love the sagacity of Bogdan who is like an omnipresent protector of the four dotty detectives. ‘Everyone wants to feel special, but nobody wants to feel different,’ is just pure genius.

There are some moments of real poignancy – especially where Stephen is concerned – which I believe is what you want from a good comedy to make it work: a healthy dose of (prospective) tragedy to level things up. Those scenes have actually stayed with me the longest.

I enjoyed how everything played out towards multiple reveals and, pleasingly, I had suspected completely the wrong character as the murderer! Loose ends were tied up like nooses and the conclusion felt very satisfactory.

It was very enjoyable to be back in the company of these amateur sleuths. I will almost certainly join them again soon, although I fear that our cosy crime club might be about to face some stark truths.

My wife is a professional chaperone for children and – accompanied by our campervan (and sometimes me!) – is to be found all over the UK on various assignments. One of these took us to Leeds Dock where I walked along the Leeds Liverpool canal while Michelle watched the rain pouring down the windows of a warm, dry TV studio.

And yet, it didn’t feel like that at all to me. I spent some happy – formative - years in the north of England, including Leeds and Sheffield. As a lover of history, the industrial heritage to be observed if only people would look up from their mobiles is truly fascinating. Just along the waterfront an old barge called ‘Marjorie R’ is moored. She used to carry coal to the nearby Thornhill Power Station but now she has opened her doors to the general public as the Hold Fast bookshop.

Wandering around the vast underbelly of Marjorie – which must be some kind of optical illusion – I came across No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader by Mark Hodkinson. I found the title intriguing (box ticked) and thought it might be enjoyable to revisit my feelings about books and music and place in a similar time period of 70s and 80s revisited by Mark.

For a lot of the time it was just that. Enjoyable reminiscences that resonated in terms of shared experiences if from a bit further away on my part. My dad was a postman and we were a working-class family, but there were always books in our house. My mum read quite prolifically and the library visit each week was one I quickly looked forward to. I wouldn’t say that books were explicitly encouraged, but they were always there if not always affordable.

As I got older, I worked in libraries and information units. One of my first ‘colleagues’ who would have quickly become bypassed by the technology and ‘processes’ Mark refers to when discussing his early career in local journalism. He invited me round to his house once. The only thing I can remember about him, his wife and his house is a bright front room with a single wall completely covered by books.

I was hooked from that moment on and Mark’s acronym: BABLE, or 'Book Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy’ absolutely resonated with me. I too have accumulated far more books – fiction and non-fiction – than I am likely to have time left in my life to actually read. The penny dropped for me just as it did for Mark, and yet we continue. I have two such rooms now with floor-to-ceiling walls of books.

There are some lovely flashbacks to Mark’s time with his grandfather who offered words of penetrating wisdom (in the sense that it got through the self-confident, swagger of youth and made it to his/our hearts) even as his mind was being lost. I also enjoyed the various tableaux Mark describes and could almost be back there myself.

For me, the message of this one book that all books provide us with a refuge is the one I identified with the most. Books, for Mark and I, are friends that won’t let you down. They may enlighten; disappoint; make you laugh and make you cry but they will always be the same. They wait patiently for us to engage with them, recognising as they look out at us from the shelves where they sit, that, although our appearances age and the depth of knowledge we store away increases through our lives until we begin to forget it all again, books won’t let you down. The jackets may get a bit dusty – creased or torn even – but they remain moored to our existence and us to theirs. They are true friends.

I think Mark labours the point about being an exception to the rule of what was expected of young men – if anything at all – in that part of the country. Yes, he ‘went south’ and it worked for him as a successful journalist, writing for The Times, Guardian and other leading broadsheets (is that still a word?). Yes, we applaud his success and admire his undoubted ability to write. However, I didn’t warm to him, and I found the last fifth of the book quite self-indulgent. There are only so many times you can bemoan the disadvantages of your upbringing in terms of time and place.

It was an interesting read, and I did hold fast right until the end, but I’m not sure how much more I learned about being a working-class exception than I did when coming across an old coal barge in the pouring rain one morning in Leeds. Not a bad read, but certainly not exceptional.

​Some years ago, my wife and I travelled to Kos to attend a friend’s wedding. It was the start of a new life for her and her partner. Our hotel was lovely, with plentiful food choices in the restaurant and a private swimming pool to laze around afterwards. The wedding took place on the nearby beach with red rose petals leading the bride and groom towards the promise of a good life together.

I was thinking of this idyllic scene during the recent, unseasonably warm weather as I gathered up my copy of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and challenged the sunshine to stop me in my tracks. It didn’t but the writing did. From the ravaged dustbowl of Oklahoma through to the less natural ravages of humankind in California, I joined the Joad family on their journey towards a promised land.

Forced off the land and packing what few possessions they still had onto their rickety truck, three generations of the same family leave everything they have ever known to head west. They have withstood immense hardship just to arrive at this point in time, but now all of the elements have conspired to move them on, to move them out.

Set in the Depression of 1930s America, there is also a higher narrative, regularly appearing between chapters of toil, struggle, and death. That narrative tells us that this is not just about one family, but of communities who had the misfortune to live in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only route available to them is away from their homes; to leave their former lives behind.

The family faces physical and mental obstacles, helped only by fellow refugees who not only understand their shared plight but share enough to try to help each other as best they can. Family members drift away, surely never to be seen again, and others die en route. Pa is worn out, as is his position as head of the family. Ma assumes a dignified defiance, but only the youthful energy of brothers Al and Tom (who has served time in jail and is literally on the run) sustains the family.

Arriving at last in California, following their dream of finding work, a house, a school for the young ones; maybe even a piece of land, the family moves from one camp for the homeless – including Hoovervilles – to another, while seeking to work for their living and only earning enough to barely survive each day.

Hope arrives in one such community that runs its own affairs, and sets its own rules for the good of all. Obviously, this attracts suspicion and contempt from the authorities who were happy with things just as they were before, and have no intention of handing over their long-established structures and hierarchies to outsiders.

Long-standing residents of the state and the authorities seeking to protect ‘law and order’ are frightened by the influx of starving, increasingly angry people, knowing as they do that the ‘Okies’ have been duped: there will never be enough work to go around and what they have, they need to hold on to. Fear and self-preservation are the determinants here and no state or federal government is going to lift a finger to challenge those drivers, rather support them to unsettle their fellow men, less fortunate than they are, by ensuring that the dream is, in reality, seen as the nightmare it actually is. You’re more likely to wake up in a hostile, unwelcoming land so better to die horribly in the places you’ve left behind rather than attempt such fruitless, hopeless escapes from them.

The Joads retain their humility and their resolve – even offering the milk of human kindness to starving strangers as the book concludes, inconclusively, now with the experienced truth of not just nature’s unpredictable hostility but man’s inhumanity to man.

Those who profess to be religious have tried to turn this Pulitzer Prize-winning epic into some kind of modern-day ‘Exodus.’ This is not a story of liberation though. Surely being shackled to a plough in the most inhospitable weather is preferable to being shackled to hopelessness amidst your inhospitable fellow men.

Lauded by many as a classic and cited as a key reason for Steinbeck going on to win the Nobel Prize for literature, there was also derision at the time about him portraying communist principles in terms of self-determination through collective support, especially in working practices.

I simply loved it. The writing is beautiful, especially the descriptions of nature in its purest forms. Yes, the language can be tricky at times and, yes, sometimes I did feel that points were drawn out a bit to be emphasized, but I am so pleased I finally got to read it and recommend it to all.

When I’d finished, I also remembered the refugees from Syria who were camped along the coast from that wedding in Kos, carefully hidden away by the Greek authorities who warned us not to engage with them as it would just ‘encourage’ them. The important people continue to tell us that we need to stop the small boats; stop the little people who never chose to move for the promise of something better in the first place, but rather because they had nowhere else to go. 

John Steinbeck has been called "a giant of American letters” but his social observations were not the stuff of myth; they were real, are real.

You know when Amazon sends you those messages about a title ‘you may have missed’? Well, I remembered seeing The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt years ago (almost 12 to be almost precise) but somehow missed out on reading it at the time. It was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, so many other readers presumably didn’t.

It was the title that drew me in: simple but wanting me to read the publisher’s blurb and an albeit mixed bag of reviews. Having downloaded The Librarianist to my online book pile which never seems to go down, I thought I’d catch up with this title first – deWitt’s second – and head over to the west coast America of the 1850s.

Eli Sisters is the narrator of this tale of gunmen for hire – himself and his brother Charles – who head down from their base in Oregon to the state of California which has had its proverbial head shaken by the fanaticism of gold prospectors. We get a real sense of Western life – basic, filthy and unerringly tough – as our partners in crime attempt to track down their prey - Hermann Kermit Warm – whom their sponsor (the mysteriously named ’Commodore’) has decreed must die.

There are fight scenes, shootings, a one-eyed horse and lots of alcohol along the way which take us through saloons, campfires and clearings by rivers where the usually elusive search for gold is fired by man’s determination to satisfy his greed. The characters are well-drawn rather than caricatures of the age and I easily found myself present on these stages (thankfully, merely observing the action).

This may be a homage to the Western form, but there is so much more to the book, written in short chapters that keep us all moving along. It is a celebration of the brothers’ differences in that Eli – a gentle, empathetic soul who has deepening reservations of what it is that they are paid to do – and Charles who is the alpha brother with a psychopathic mindset always threatening to run to excess. And yet, the blood that remains in the bodies of brothers may be thicker after all.

However, about a third of the way through the book, something clicked and, yes, it was one of those flashes of clarity that even the glinting prospect of gold had not illuminated. The writing was beautiful – outstanding even – but not at all how characters from that time, that background would have spoken. It felt like I was on the set of a Tarantino film – just as funny and just as mind-blowing. The language could have been used by two gentlemen in the drawing room of a Victorian country house at precisely the same time. Once I grasped this, I allowed myself to be taken on an unexpected journey through a valley of discovery I didn’t want to complete, even if they did by the end.
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Like so many real-life drifters during this period, I felt the story fell away a little towards the end, but not until after we’d struck gold.

I could pop over to Prime now to view the movie version of this book, but I won’t. I’d prefer to see the characters as they were originally painted rather than through a reproduction. Perhaps I’ll attack that list of more unread books instead and head for The Librarianist.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles left me feeling hugely uplifted, not just by the surprising and ultimately satiating story line but by the funny and fascinating characters we met along the way. The Lincoln Highway has all of these same page-turning attributes but I think the truisms of this story made me think more deeply and certainly moved me even more. The last couple of chapters were, in particular, simply outstanding.

Set in 1950s America the story centres on Emmett who returns to Nebraska from a state youth farm in Kansas where he has been serving time for ‘involuntary manslaughter.’ His young brother Billy is waiting for him under the watchful eye of their nearest neighbours. Their father who unsuccessfully chased his farming dream has died and this is a new start for them. Billy is keen to forge their new life together in San Francisco where he believes their mother, who could no longer handle small-town failure, is waiting for them.

Unknown to either of them, two of Emmett’s acquaintances from the same Kansas facility have stowed away in the boot of the car that brought him back. Duchess is on a twisted mission to right wrongs in a very different way to Emmett. Woolly, an endearing but equally damaged individual, is seeking salvation of his own. The upshot is that they travel east instead of west towards New York as part of an unlikely shortcut to happiness.

I had always thought that Route 66 crossed the United States but in fact, only runs from Chicago to Santa Monica. The original coast-to-coast highway was The Lincoln Highway, which opened in 1913, beginning in Times Square, New York and ending in Lincoln Park, San Francisco. The route is a homage to that great President, though much of the story concerns good (even great) aspirations that falter through taking the wrong turnings or simply being in the wrong places at the wrong times.

The use throughout of different voices and points of view works really well as a device and gives us a more rounded sense of completeness while also calling out the foolhardiness of accepting people and places and ensuing events as they first appear.
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There were many points in this beautifully written story when I could have looked around me and seen what Steinbeck saw. It is honestly that good. Billy carries with him a book of adventure stories: tales of those heroes who went out into the world – real or mystical – and we are reminded that heroic deeds are accessible to all of us. No matter the obstacles continually placed in the way of these pilgrims who would have found The Mayflower as far away in years as the miles that separate them from their origins, we will them to find happiness, but not so quickly as to break the spells Towles has cast over all of us by his wonderful storytelling.