A 115-year-old man lays on his deathbed as the 2016 US election results arrive, and revisits his life in this moving story of love, fatherhood, and the American century
A visionary and poignant novel centred around former newspaperman Sam Cunningham as he prepares to die, Late City covers much of the early twentieth century, unfurling as a conversation between the dying man and a surprising God. As the two review Sam’s life, from his childhood in the American South and his time in the French trenches during World War I to his fledgling newspaper career in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties and the decades that follow, snippets of history are brought sharply into focus.
Sam grows up in Louisiana, with a harsh father, who he comes to resent both for his physical abuse and for what Sam eventually perceives as his flawed morality. Eager to escape and prove himself, Sam enlists in the army as a sniper while still underage. The hardness his father instilled in him helps him make it out of World War I alive, but, as he recounts these tales on his deathbed, we come to realise that it also prevents him from contending with the emotional wounds of war. Back in the US, Sam moves to Chicago to begin a career as a newspaperman that will bring him close to all the major historical turns of the twentieth century. There he meets his wife and has a son, whose fate counters Sam’s at almost every turn.
As he contemplates his relationships - with his parents, his brothers in arms, his wife, his editor, and most importantly, his son - Sam is amazed at what he still has left to learn about himself after all these years in this heart-rending novel from the Pulitzer Prize winner.
Praise for Robert Olen Butler
‘Late City is a poignant meditation on the circle of life, the wonder we all feel as it slips away.’ - Minneapolis Star Tribune
‘Written in a hard-boiled, staccato style, Paris in the Dark is an intelligent, stylish thriller, and so atmospheric that the pages reek of Gitanes and coffee.’ - Times on Paris in the Dark
‘A morally complex and beautifully written thriller with a delicately portrayed love story at its heart. A cut above.’ - Mail on Sunday on Paris in the Dark
‘Butler’s prose is fluid, and his handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His descriptive gifts don’t extend just to his characters’ traits or their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he’s addressing.‘ - New York Times Book Review on Perfume River
'Perfume River is a highly accomplished novel. Butler’s prose is polished and supple, his elegant voice capable of shifting from academia to the whoosh… and blare of combat, then to the lush immediacy of Vietnam.’ - Spectator on Perfume River
‘Butler writes essentially, and in a bewitching translation of voice and sympathy, what it means to lose a country, to remember it, and to have the memory begin to grow old. He writes as if it were his loss too.’ - LA Times Book Review on A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
