His new novel, THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY, will be released on October 5, 2021. The two novels have collectively sold more than four million copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages. Those hoping for the classic road trip novel that the book’s blurb, endpapers, and cover promise it to be will be disappointed as Towles instead decides to ditch the intended plot for a lengthy and laborious cat-and-mouse storyline that takes up the entire novel. Amor Towles is the author of New York Times bestsellers RULES OF CIVILITY and A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW. The highway itself acts as nothing more than a MacGuffin, or a device that motivates the plot but ends up being entirely irrelevant to the work. After enlisting his younger brother, the precocious Billy, all goes awry when two of Emmett’s friends, stowaways from the work farm, turn up with a plan regarding a safety deposit box, $150,000, and an eye set in the opposite direction: New York.Īs the reader will quickly realise, The Lincoln Highway is not the novel that it purports to be. Our main character, Emmett Watson, fresh from a stint on a juvenile work farm, hatches a plan to retrace the route his mother took along the Lincoln Highway when she disappeared to California years before. Even the title itself, a reference to the first transcontinental highway to traverse the United States, conjures images of red deserts, of straight-as-an-arrow roads, of Buicks and Cadillacs, of sea to shining sea, of Henry Fonda, of Stars and Stripes forever and ever. The Lincoln Highway offers us a thick slice of Americana. Haunting the bestseller charts for years, it surely provided its author, Amor Towles, with the stability of never having to write an earnest word ever again in his life. A Gentleman in Moscow was one of those novels where to describe it as a bestseller is truly an understatement.
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