Summary and Reviews of The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

The Lincoln Highway

A Novel

by Amor Towles
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (9):
  • Readers' Rating (8):
  • First Published:
  • Oct 5, 2021, 592 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Mar 2023, 592 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

Winner of the 2021 BookBrowse Fiction Award

The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America.

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. 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 eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. 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. 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.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

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    BookBrowse Awards
    2021

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

The Lincoln Highway features some fantastic characters. Precocious Billy steals every scene he appears in. Duchess is a delightfully flamboyant bounder, peppering his speech with malapropisms and Shakespeare quotes — he takes after his father, a roguish traveling actor who abandoned him at an orphanage. Woolly is a dozy, melancholy young man, described as being "not all there" or "away with the fairies." A danger with an episodic narrative like this one is that random events and encounters pile up but don't do much to further the plot. Despite the condensed timeframe here, it's a meandering story that can try one's patience. Other readers, no doubt, will appreciate the old-fashioned American road trip vibe. There is something appealing about the conjunction of bravery and mischief, and it's reassuring how the novel comes full circle and promises further adventures ahead...continued

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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).

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Beyond the Book



Studebaker and the Land Cruiser

Studebaker logo on green vehicle In The Lincoln Highway, the main characters undertake a would-be cross-country road trip in Emmett Watson's pride and joy, a 1948 powder-blue Studebaker Land Cruiser.

The Studebaker company, now known as a long-lasting and iconic automotive manufacturer, was founded in South Bend, Indiana in 1852. The Studebaker family had emigrated from Germany to Philadelphia in the 1730s. Peter Studebaker made wagons in colonial Pennsylvania and Maryland. It was his grandsons — the five brothers Henry, Clement, John, Peter and Jacob — who set up the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company. It initially produced other types of vehicles, like buggies, carriages, coaches and covered wagons; in 1902, it began producing automobiles.

...

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Read-Alikes

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