**Finalist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize**
**Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the
Goldsmiths Prize for Innovative Fiction, and the Roehampton Poetry
Prize**
From the award-winning British author--a poet's noir narrative that
tells the story of a D-Day veteran in postwar America: a good man,
brutalized by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return
to it, yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself.
Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can't
return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for
freedom, anonymity and repair. As he finds his way from New York to Los
Angeles and San Francisco, we witness a crucial period of fracture in
American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream
had gone sour but--as those dark, classic movies made clear--the country
needed outsiders to study and to dramatize its new anxieties. Both an
outsider and, gradually, an insider, Walker finds work as a journalist,
and tries to piece his life together as America is beginning to come
apart: riven by social and racial divisions, spiraling corruption, and
the collapse of the inner cities. Robin Robertson's fluid verse pans
with filmic immediacy across the postwar urban scene--and into the heart
of an unforgettable character--in this highly original work of art.
