A 115-year-old man lies on his deathbed as the 2016 election results
arrive, and revisits his life in this moving story of love, fatherhood,
and the American century from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen
Butler.
A visionary and poignant novel centered 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 realize that it also prevents
him from contending with the emotional wounds of war. Back in the U.S.,
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.
