The Gambler’s Nephew

Jack Matthews’ first novel, Hanger Stout, Awake!, was published in 1967, and his latest, The Gambler’s Nephew, is already the 23rd in his half-century career. Thankfully it’s never too late to discover a writer this pleasant to read.–Claire Blechman, Ploughshares

There’s so much to delight a reader in local author Jack Matthews’ new novel, The Gambler’s Nephew, it’s hard to know where to start. Probably with the prose, which Matthews writes with easy, lyrical grace and a bulls-eye wit.–Jim Phillips, The Athens News

Jack Matthews is an American original.–William Heyen

Years ago, way back in the l850s, there was a wealthy merchant in the little Ohio River town of Brackenport by name of Nehemiah Dawes who got to brooding over slavery and grave robbing so much that his mind became unbalanced.

The Gambler’s Nephew presents a world of abolitionist passion, murder, and old-fashioned cussedness, a world of steamboats plying the Ohio River, and a world with people troubled by such grand irrelevancies as love. Here is a world as richly confused as our own–and as alive as living can get.