Description

A master American novelist. –Vanity Fair Ned Ayres has never wanted anything but a newspaper career. His defining moment comes early, when Ned is city editor of his hometown paper. One of his beat reporters fields a tip: William Grant, the town haberdasher, married to the bank president s daughter and the father of two children, once served six years in Joliet. The story runs–Ned offers no resistance to his publisher s argument that the public has a right to know. The consequences, swift and shocking, haunt him throughout a long career until eventually, as the editor of a major newspaper in post-Kennedy-era Washington, DC, Ned has reason to return to the question of privacy and its many violations–the gorgeously limned themes running through Ward Just s elegiac and masterly new novel. A doggedly restrained character study that advances its themes obliquely through atmosphere and tone. Often, the effect is quietly, even elegiacally beautiful, evoking the rhythms of Ernest Hemingway s early fiction . . . A quietly affecting, mournful achievement. — Richmond Times-Dispatch In Just s hands, the ambiguous motives behind the paper s pursuit of the story are riveting . . . The novel stands on Just s memorable study of Ned. Your heart goes out to this kindly, complex man who s not truly interested in the things of his own life, preferring the lives of others. — Seattle Times