A crooked preacher named Pastor John is the worst of the lot, straight out of The Night of the Hunter, quoting Bible verses even as he plots to steal Billy’s collection of silver dollars. Pleasingly, the boys cross paths with a varied cast of characters: clowns, hobos, out-of-work actors, panhandlers, home-makers, hucksters and just plumb ordinary folk. He leads Emmett and Billy a fine dance across the north-eastern US, with his sidekick, lost soul Woolly, simply hoping for a good meal and a safe home. Duchess, though likable and quick-witted, is hopelessly untrustworthy. Duchess and Woolly, also 18, are driving it to New York City to raid Woolly’s trust fund and settle a few scores. But there’s a hitch: Emmett’s beloved powder-blue Studebaker has been “borrowed” by a couple of boys on the run from the work farm. His father has died, and his younger brother, Billy, is keen for the two of them to head to California in search of their mother, who walked out eight years ago. It is 1954, and 18-year-old Emmett Watson has just finished a spell at the Kansas work farm where he was sent after accidentally killing a bully. Hundreds of miles roll by over the course of The Lincoln Highway, a breezy Bildungsroman meets road trip that suits the Boston-born Towles’s expansive, folksy, anecdotal style down to the ground. For his latest, Towles has looked to the open road. 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.T he hero of Amor Towles’s previous novel, the multimillion-selling A Gentleman in Moscow, spent 480 pages cooped up in a posh hotel, unable to leave on pain of death – a luxury lockdown. 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. 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. 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.
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. And master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America
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