The Lincoln Highway

by Amor Towles

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Adventure

592 Pages

"I didn't want The Lincoln Highway to end. Towles builds a world so vivid and characters so alive that ten days feels like a whole life. The ending wrecked me in the best possible way."

Synopsis

It is June 1954, and eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson has just been released from a juvenile work farm in Nebraska, where he served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. The warden drives him home himself. What awaits Emmett there is not much: his mother left long ago, his father has just died, and the bank has foreclosed on the family farm. His plan is simple — collect his eight-year-old brother Billy and drive west to California, where they might build something new from nothing.

The plan unravels immediately. When the warden pulls away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have stowed themselves in the trunk of the car. They have their own ideas about Emmett's future — ideas that point not west toward California but east, toward New York City. What follows is a journey of ten days, told from multiple perspectives, that takes four very different people across mid-century America in directions none of them entirely intended.

Stylish, propulsive, and peopled with richly imagined characters, The Lincoln Highway is Amor Towles at his most expansive — a novel that wears its literary ambitions lightly while delivering the pleasure of a story you genuinely cannot put down.

Our Take

Amor Towles has a gift that is rarer than it sounds: he writes novels that are genuinely pleasurable to read without sacrificing an ounce of intelligence or craft. The Lincoln Highway is his most kinetic book — structured around ten days and multiple viewpoints, it moves with the momentum of a thriller while doing the careful character work of literary fiction. The result is a novel that earns its 592 pages without ever feeling padded.

The ensemble is one of Towles's finest achievements. Emmett is a grounded, sympathetic center, but it is the characters around him — including young Billy, whose worldview is shaped entirely by the heroes of history and literature — who give the book its texture and its heart. Towles has a particular talent for writing characters who operate according to their own internal logic, however skewed, and that talent is on full display here.

Readers who fell for the wit and warmth of Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow will find much to love, as will fans of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys for its portrait of mid-century America's promises and betrayals. A big, generous, beautifully constructed novel — the kind that reminds you why you love reading in the first place.