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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
October 2016
On Sale: October 18, 2016
208 pages
ISBN: 0544836588
EAN: 9780544836587
Kindle: B01912P5YS
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
From an American master comes another “beautifully
languid, emotionally intense tale” (Entertainment
Weekly), this time of a newspaper editor’s fateful
decision to expose a small-town fugitive. Ned Ayres, the son of a judge in an Indiana town in
midcentury America, has never wanted anything but a
newspaper career—in his father’s appalled view, a “junk
business,” a way of avoiding responsibility. The defining
moment comes early, when Ned is city editor of his
hometown paper. One of his beat reporters fields a tip:
William Grant, the town haberdasher, married to the bank
president’s daughter and father of two children, once
served six years in Joliet. The story runs—Ned offers no
resistance to his publisher's argument that the public
has a right to know. The consequences, swift and
shocking, haunt him throughout a long career, as he moves
first to Chicago, where he engages in a spirited love
affair that cannot, in the end, compete with the pull of
the newsroom—“never lonely, especially when it was
empty”—and the “subtle beauty” of the front page.
Finally, as the editor of a major newspaper in post-
Kennedy-era Washington, DC, Ned has reason to return to
the question of privacy and its many violations—the
gorgeously limned themes running through Ward Just’s
elegiac and masterly new novel.
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