Before becoming a full-time writer, Mr. Lehane worked as a counselor with children with cognitive disabilities and those who had been abused, waited tables, parked cars, drove limos, worked in bookstores, and loaded tractor-trailers. His one regret is that no one ever gave him a chance to tend bar!
The award winning novel Mystic Riveris a tense and unnerving psychological thriller. It's also an epic novel of love, faith, loyalty and family, in which people irrevocably marked by the past find themselves on a collision course with the darkest truths of their own hidden selves. I found both the book and the movie by the same name spellbinding!
The Given Day is an unflinching family epic that captures the political unrest of a nation caught between a well-patterned past and an unpredictable future. This beautifully written novel of American history tells the story of two families - one black, one white - swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power at the end of World War I.
In The Given Day, Lehane gives a painfully honest portrayal of the bitter racial, ethnic and class divisions that marred America in 1919 and he wraps it up in two engaging family stories. The best historical fiction leads the reader to search out the story in more detail and Lehane succeeds with his descriptions of the little known 1917 race riot in East St. Louis and the 1919 molasses plant explosion in Boston (which was blamed falsely on anarchists rather than on the lack of maintenance by the plant's owners.)
The award winning novel Mystic Riveris a tense and unnerving psychological thriller. It's also an epic novel of love, faith, loyalty and family, in which people irrevocably marked by the past find themselves on a collision course with the darkest truths of their own hidden selves. I found both the book and the movie by the same name spellbinding!
The Given Day is an unflinching family epic that captures the political unrest of a nation caught between a well-patterned past and an unpredictable future. This beautifully written novel of American history tells the story of two families - one black, one white - swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power at the end of World War I.
In The Given Day, Lehane gives a painfully honest portrayal of the bitter racial, ethnic and class divisions that marred America in 1919 and he wraps it up in two engaging family stories. The best historical fiction leads the reader to search out the story in more detail and Lehane succeeds with his descriptions of the little known 1917 race riot in East St. Louis and the 1919 molasses plant explosion in Boston (which was blamed falsely on anarchists rather than on the lack of maintenance by the plant's owners.)
