Author(s): Todd McEWEN

Novel | North America | Humour & Satire | CB Editions

The doctor delivers bad news. What's a man to do, with the life he has left to live? He can cry, he can wonder which particular cigarette did it - the 564,119th or the 976,835th - or which brand. Kent? Pall Mall? Or (and as well) he can call the friend he loves in the city he loves and then set out down the avenues and streets of New York to meet him. He walks, he runs, he sits, he remembers. Every corner, every block has a memory: women, food, drink, friendship, the comedy of office life and of sexual success and failure. It's as though the towers of Manhattan have become a shelf of books, each to be opened and regretfully read for the last time. A day to remember and a journey, truly, of a lifetime.

‘A tender, wise, capacious, funny, elegiac and free-spirited celebration of Manhattan, the martini, and much, much more.’
     – Christopher Reid

First published by Granta in 2003 and reissued by CBe in 2020.

The news from McK’s doctor is not good. He arranges to meet with Isidor at six in The Hour. His memory-crowded walk there through the streets of New York is both elegaic and a celebration of the nobility of city life, and of the graces of friendship.

‘Ferocious wit, a stream of magnificent sentences, something to savour on every page, and a blissful knowledge of what really matters in life.’
     – Guardian

‘One of the great American novels . . . Overwhelming – as great and sad a love song as the city has ever inspired.’
     – Salon

‘A dizzying, compelling novel that throws humour, pathos and crudeness up from the page in equal measures from start to finish . . . raw, immediate, funny and leaving no emotion unexplored.’ 
     – Scotland on Sunday

‘A finely crafted, elegaic digression into anecdotal years of living, walking, loving, arguing, smoking and drinking in Manhattan . . . an almost Whitmanesque hommage to the city’s delights.’
     – Independent

‘It almost demands to be read out aloud, in order to help the reader unfold the mercurial syntax, the darting, quixotic process of thought.’
    – Scotsman