“Eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is released from a Kansas juvenile-detention farm in 1954 and plans to drive west to California with his eight-year-old brother. Two escaped inmates have other plans for the trip.”
What's in this book
- Amor Towles's 2021 novel — an eighteen-year-old released from juvenile detention in 1954 plans to drive west
- New York Times bestseller; the road-novel follow-up to A Gentleman in Moscow
- 592 pages of patient eight-character ensemble construction across ten days of an eastbound trip",
- Author also wrote Rules of Civility (2011) and Table for Two (2024)
- Edoardo Ballerini full-cast audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of A Gentleman in Moscow, Lonesome Dove, and contemporary American road-novel fiction
Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
The Lincoln Highway is Amor Towles's 2021 third novel, the New York Times bestseller and the road-novel follow-up to A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) and Rules of Civility (2011). The structural premise is Emmett Watson, an eighteen-year-old recently released from a Kansas juvenile-detention work farm in June 1954, returning home to his Nebraska farm to collect his eight-year-old brother Billy and drive the family Studebaker west to California to look for the mother who left them years earlier. Two other inmates from the work farm, Duchess Hewett and Wooly Martin, have stowed away in the trunk of the warden's car that drove Emmett home. Duchess and Wooly have a different plan: drive east to New York to collect twenty-five thousand dollars from a Hudson Valley estate Wooly's family controls.
Towles's structural method is the patient eight-character ensemble construction across the ten days of the eastbound trip; each character gets first-person chapters and the trip runs simultaneously from Emmett's Nebraska perspective, Duchess's opportunistic perspective, Wooly's gentle-but-troubled perspective, and Billy's eight-year-old perspective informed entirely by his encyclopedia of mythic-heroes that he reads through the entire trip. The Hudson Valley estate chapters in the middle third are the structural emotional center of the novel. The Billy chapters across the whole novel are some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose about a specific eight-year-old's consciousness. The Sally Ransom subplot is the structural weak spot of an otherwise carefully built novel.
Recommended for Towles's growing literary commercial audience, for fans of A Gentleman in Moscow looking for the next Towles, and for the broader contemporary literary commercial road-novel tradition. Compare to Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry), All the King's Men (Robert Penn Warren), and Towles's own Rules of Civility (2011) as the structural antecedents. The Edoardo Ballerini full-cast audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars, slightly under A Gentleman in Moscow.
Related reads
If you liked The Lincoln Highway
A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 2016 review. Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced in 1922 to lifelong house arrest at the Hotel Metropol. Towles's second novel and one of the most consistently recommended contemporary American literary commercial titles of the past decade.
Rules of Civility
by Amor Towles
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles 2011 review. A working-class Manhattan secretary navigates 1938 New York society. Towles's debut and the literary commercial breakthrough before A Gentleman in Moscow.
Table for Two
by Amor Towles
Table for Two by Amor Towles 2024 review. Six New York stories and the Eve in Hollywood novella that continues Rules of Civility into 1938 Los Angeles. Towles's first short-fiction collection.
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 review. Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988 and one of the canonical American novels of the late twentieth century.
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 1985 review. A nameless teenager joins a band of Indian-hunters along the Texas-Mexico border in 1849. The most violent American novel of the late twentieth century and the rare McCarthy book that demands the prose attention it requires.
Bring Up the Bodies
by Hilary Mantel
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel 2012 review. Thomas Cromwell engineers the fall of Anne Boleyn and the rise of Jane Seymour. Booker Prize 2012, the second volume of the Cromwell trilogy, and the rare novel that exceeds an already-canonical predecessor.
More by this author