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Title details for Late City by Robert Olen Butler - Available

Late City

by Robert Olen Butler
Danny Campbell
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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 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 US, Sam moves to Chicago to begin a career as a newspaperman. 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 7, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781696606851
      • File size: 242311 KB
      • Duration: 08:24:48

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 5, 2021
      Pulitzer winner Butler steps away from his Christopher Marlowe Cobb series for a moving tale of love and misunderstanding. In 2016, Sam Cunningham, 115 and dying in a nursing home, is visited by God, who interviews him as if for a story (“I want you to talk to me, Samuel. About your life. On the record”). In 1917, Sam flees Louisiana and his racist abusive father to enlist in the Army. After the war, Sam lands a job as a reporter in Chicago and marries Colleen, who in 1922 delivers their only child, Ryan. Sam loves his wife and son, but is unable or unwilling to recognize their true natures, or to grasp why Colleen married him. As WWII looms, Sam tries to prepare the sensitive Ryan for battle. (“I just want you to have the best chance to fully become what you are,” he says, unaware of the irony.) Determined to make his father proud, Ryan joins the Navy in 1940, and what happens to him during the war will change everyone in the family. The God character at first seems a superfluous narrative artifice, but Butler mines the device for an elegant pair of revelations about Colleen and Ryan. Readers with the patience for an old man’s stubbornness will appreciate the redemption herein. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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