“David Gilbert’s & Sons is that novel you’ve been waiting for without knowing you were waiting. Big, brilliant, and terrifically funny, it’s a moving story about fathers and sons and success, a dead-on, deadpan retelling of our American literary myth.”
—Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
There’s a long tradition of novels about writers, and some have been more successful than others in capturing the unique life of professional scribes. David Gilbert’s new novel, & Sons, takes on the writer-writing-about-writers challenge head-on, and succeeds brilliantly.The linchpin of Gilbert’s book is the fictional author A. N. Dyer—a mythical figure in the tradition of J.D. Salinger. Dyer’s boarding school-set novel, Ampersand, was the defining work of his generation, but he’s now a reclusive old man who’s defined by the legacy of his youthful output. As mortality sets in, and he wrestles with what sort of life he’s led, he confronts a disconcerting gap between the myth and the man. He calls his adult sons together to hash out what remains of their relationship, and to decide if it’s too late to tend to lingering wounds.
& Sons has been almost universally critically-acclaimed, and is the perfect book to end the summer with—a weighty, masterful novel that will help you transition from beach reads to the more serious pursuits of autumn.