Todd McEwen's fourth novel is a great and desperate cry for the nobility and necessity of city life - and the graces of friendship.
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 that 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.
This tender, funny novel is a salute to the enchantment of a great city - and the sweet, frustrating mysteries of life - by an author the Guardian described as "one of the few real writers around".
