The Lincoln Highway
Amor Towles, 2021
Historical fiction Contemporary fiction
Just out of reform school in 1954, Emmett wants to drive to California with his little brother — until two escapees arrive with a different plan.
Feels like wonder. About freedom, adventure and family.
A page from the book
What a photograph holds that the people standing in it can't see.
The funny thing about a picture, thought Woolly, the funny thing about a picture is that while it knows everything that’s happened up until the moment it’s been taken, it knows absotively nothing about what will happen next. And yet, once the picture has been framed and hung on a wall, what you see when you look at it closely are all the things that were about to happen. All the un-things. The things that were unanticipated. And unintended. And unreversible. Amor Towles.Towles spent two decades in investment banking before publishing his first novel, Rules of Civility, in his forties.
Books that feel like this
More by Amor Towles
A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles, 2016
A Russian count is sentenced to house arrest in a grand Moscow hotel, where four decades of dinners, friendships and small rebellions must fit inside a few hundred rooms.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Lincoln Highway like?
- Feels like wonder. About freedom, adventure and family.
- What should I read after The Lincoln Highway?
- If you liked The Lincoln Highway, try Tress of the Emerald Sea (Brandon Sanderson), Malibu Rising (Taylor Jenkins Reid) and The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman).
A taste of the feed
How much of your character is just a container you were poured into?
We want to imagine that people are consistent, steady, stable. We define who they are, create descriptions to lock them on a page, divide them up by their likes, talents, beliefs. Then we pretend some—perhaps most—are better than we are, because they stick to their definitions, while we never quite fit ours. Truth is, people are as fluid as time is. We adapt to our situation like water in a strangely shaped jug, though it might take us a little while to ooze into all the little nooks. Because we adapt, we sometimes don’t recognize how twisted, uncomfortable, or downright wrong the container is that we’ve been told to inhabit.
Tress of the Emerald Sea · Brandon Sanderson
Ask four siblings about their parents' marriage and you get four different books.
The story of June and Mick Riva seemed like a tragedy to their oldest child, Nina. It felt like a comedy of errors to their first son, Jay. It was an origin story for their second son, Hud. And a mystery to the baby of the family, Kit. To Mick himself it was just a chapter of his memoir.
Malibu Rising · Taylor Jenkins Reid
When beauty enters the body before the mind can name it.
I didn’t know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.
The Secret Life of Bees · Sue Monk Kidd
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