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An American Novel
by Norman Lock
Launched into existence by Mark Twain in 1835, Huck Finn and Jim have now been transported by Norman Lock through three vital, violent, and transformative centuries of American history. As time unfurls on the river's banks, they witness decisive battles of the Civil War, the betrayal of Reconstruction's promises to the freed slaves, the crushing of the Native American nations, and the electrification of a continent. Huck, who finally comes of age when he's washed up on shore during Hurricane Katrina, narrates the story as an older and wiser man in 2077, revealing our nation's past, present, and future as Mark Twain could never have dreamed it.
The Boy in His Winter is a tour-de-force work of imagination, beauty, and courage that re-envisions a great American literary classic for our time.
"Starred Review. Lock plays profound tricks, with language - his is crystalline and underline-worthy - and with time, the perfect metaphor for which is the mighty Mississippi itself." - Publishers Weekly
"The philosophical and literary musings are inventive, and Lock manages to make the combination of brevity and tall-tale looseness mostly work. But for all its charms, the book ultimately seems pretty diffuse." - Kirkus
"In this surreal and otherworldly river journey through time, Norman Lock transports Huck Finn down the Mississippi and deep into America's history - and future. Elegant and imaginative, The Boy in His Winter is a tale that's as hypnotic as it is profound." - Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
"I read Norman Lock's The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain's original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy - and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America's greatest river." - David Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Polio: An American Story and Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
This information about The Boy in His Winter was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Charles Giraudet
Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage and radio plays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and has been longlisted twice for the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He has also received writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.
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