Lehane, whose previous novels include Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone, sets his latest at the end of the First World War, as waves of immigration, uneasy race relations, and agitation over labor issues culminate in a police strike in Boston. Danny, a patrolman and the son of a powerful captain, pursues a pair of anarchists determined to create chaos but also finds himself drawn to the growing police union; Luther, a talented black baseball player, flees to Boston after killing a drug lord in Tulsa. Lehane laces his narrative with melodrama - two brothers in love with the same woman, who harbors a secret past; a viciously racist cop out to destroy Luther and frame the burgeoning N.A.A.C.P. - and a subplot, involving Babe Ruth, feels stale and unnecessary. But he brings vividly to life the struggles that the working classes faced in pursuit of decent working conditions and a fair wage.

Most memoirs begin with a birth, but Hall's starts with another sort of becoming: "At fourteen I decided to spend my life writing poetry, which is what I have done." Soon Hall moves from suburban Connecticut, where "nothing happened," to Exeter, Harvard, and Oxford, his time line marked indelibly by books and illnesses. Hall's direct tone softens the extraordinariness of his life. Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich are school chums; literary successes, such as his appointment as Poet Laureate, are presented without garnish. The final two chapters, which mourn Hall's late wife, Jane Kenyon, and the fact of aging, are more emotionally wrought. Here, where the "fleshy museum of memory" is most acute, Hall affectingly navigates the tumult. In old age, his directness is part modesty and part wryness. When asked, at a Library of Congress dinner, the subject of his writing, he replies, "Love, death, and New Hampshire."

Facundo Bacardi, who founded the eponymous rum company in 1862, came to Cuba from Spain as a teen-ager. By the turn of the century, as Gjelten lucidly recounts, the distilling operation that Facundo had begun in a shed was among the brands most closely identified with Cuba, and the Bacardis became inextricably entangled with the nation's history. Facundo's eldest son, Emilio, fought to overthrow the Spanish, thus inaugurating the firm's long tradition of promoting revolutionary and progressive politics. But the Bacardis, despite their enthusiastic support for Castro's revolution, were forced into exile in Miami in the nineteen-sixties; benevolent capitalists had no place in the new Cuban paradigm. Today, the family owns a multibillion-dollar global corporation that contributes heavily to the Republican Party.

This striking debut novel is an homage to old-fashioned boy's-own adventure stories, and unfolds like a Robert Louis Stevenson tale retold amid the hardscrabble squalor of Colonial New England. The sheer strangeness of the story is beguiling: a one-handed boy, tainted by his upbringing in a Catholic orphanage and with little to offer but a head full of lice, is adopted by a con artist, and enters an underworld of ruthless mousetrap-manufacturing barons, feisty chimney-dwelling dwarves, and, perhaps most terrifying of all, black-market dentists. In keeping with the gothic tradition, Tinti writes with an arch, almost camp sensibility. While on a nocturnal grave-digging excursion to procure bodies for a crazy scientist, for instance, the pair encounter an assassin, who tells the twelve-year-old hero that he was "made for killing." Will the boy ever discover the truth of his past? It's good fun watching him find out.

Copyright ©2008

*Starred Review* Lehane’s last novel (Shutter Island, 2003) was a historical thriller, but it only reached back to the 1950s. This time he has produced his first full-scale historical epic, a detail-rich exploration of America at the end of World War I, a country on the verge of being torn apart by civil and political unrest. Focusing on the Boston Police Strike of 1919, the novel follows multiple characters through the years before the strike, setting the stage by portraying a country in the grip of panic over all forms of labor strife—from anarchist bomb-throwers to union agitators—and then bringing the disparate cast together for the crippling strike itself. At the center of the story is Danny Coughlin, an Irish beat cop from a family of cops who becomes involved in the police union movement, but the strands of Lehane’s brilliantly constructed and many-tentacled plot extend to all levels of society. Sharing center stage with Danny is Luther Lawrence, a young black man from Oklahoma who lands work in Boston as a servant in the Coughlin house, but swirling around Danny and Luther are other members of their families as well as such historical figures as Babe Ruth, about to be traded from Boston to New York, and Calvin Coolidge, out to prove his mettle by dealing forcefully with both anarchists and strikers. It is a robust plot, but it never becomes ungainly. Lehane masterfully blends his stories of human tragedy and hope with the larger cultural and political conflict in which the action unfolds, and while the comparisons to contemporary life are unavoidable, they arise on their own, without authorial intervention. Like E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime, Lehane captures the sense of a country coming of age, vividly dramatizing how the conflicting emotions and tortured dreams that drive individual human lives also send a nation roiling forward. --Bill Ott

“Steeped in history but wearing its research lightly, The Given Day is a meaty, rich, old-fashioned and satisfying tale. I’d call it Lehane’s masterpiece.” -- Seattle Times

“Packed with dramatic turning points. . . . Lehane has tried to capture the zeitgeist of an era even nuttier and more tumultuous than our own, and succeeded.”” -- Entertainment Weekly

“A brawling, brawny, muscular epic―exactly what great mainstream novels used to be.” -- Lee Child

“A historical epic that is easily the most ambitious work of Dennis Lehane’s career. . . . THE GIVEN DAY aspires to be nothing less than the Great American Novel. . . . If Lehane was ever a singles hitter, now he’s swinging for the fences.” -- Kirkus Reviews

“As much a thriller as any of Lehane’s previous work. Even beyond the historical events, THE GIVEN DAY qualifies as a sprawling, sweeping epic. . . . Lehane’s masterful packing and precise prose make the story speed by.” -- Orlando Sentinel

“A splendid flowering of the talent previously demonstrated in his crime fiction. . . . A vision of redemption and a triumph of the human spirit. In short, this nail-biter carries serious moral gravity.” -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The Given Day is a vast historical novel. . . . Spectacular details. . . . Finely thought-out. . . . . Many stunningly managed scenes.” -- Boston Globe

“This may be Lehane’s finest work. . . . But The Given Day is more than a history lesson. . . . Lehane captures the essence of being American in a fast-changing society that eerily reflects our own.” -- USA Today

“The problem falls to readers to find something―anything―that doesn’t pale in comparison once they’ve closed the covers on this 720-page masterpiece. Quite simply, THE GIVEN DAY is about as close to the great American novel as we’re likely to read until … well, until Lehane writes another.” -- BookPage

“Rollicking, brawling, gritty, political, and always completely absorbing, THE GIVEN DAY is a rich and satisfying epic. Readers, get ready to feast. This is a big book you won’t want to put down.” -- Stewart O'Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster, A Prayer for the Dying, and Snow Angels

“[A] work of admirable ambition and scope. . . . Lehane is as much like contemporaries George Pelecanos and Richard Price as he is like the bygone Boston-based John P. Marquand, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.” -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A gripping historical novel. . . . Infused with the same dark drama that set apart his earlier books.” -- Parade

“One of the fall’s biggest books―and not just because it’s 704 pages. It’s Lehane’s most ambitious and literary work.” -- USA Today

“If you’re swinging for the fences, it only makes sense that your novel begin with a lengthy, and very tasty, story about Babe Ruth. That Dennis Lehane sustains that level of play . . . is what gives THE GIVEN DAY a kind of greatness. . . . Lehane dazzles.” -- Chicago Sun-Times

“Lehane’s first historical novel is a clear winner. . . . As good as it gets.” -- Library Journal (starred review)

“Gut-wrenching force. . . . A majestic, fiery epic. . . . The Given Day is a huge, impassioned, intensively researched book that brings history alive.” -- New York Times

“Here’s one way to get people excited about the nation’s past: Get Dennis Lehane to write the history books. . . . A meticulously researched tale that in the hands of this master storyteller jumps right off the page and hollers.” -- St. Petersburg Times

“Heartfelt and moving. . . . Lehane deserves to be included among the most interesting and accomplished American novelists of any genre or category.” -- Washington Post Book World

“Superbly written, meticulously researched. . . . A thoughtful, provocative exploration of race, fame, power, and political corruption in American culture. . . . The Given Day places [Lehane] in the first rank of modern American novelists.” -- Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers

“Brilliantly constructed. . . . Like E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime, Lehane captures the sense of a country coming of age, vividly dramatizing how the conflicting emotions and tortured dreams that drive individual human lives also send a nation roiling forward.” -- Booklist (starred review)

Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane's long-awaited eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads between past and future. Filled with a cast of unforgettable characters more richly drawn than any Lehane has ever created, The Given Day 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. Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.

Here, too, are some of the most influential figures of the era—Babe Ruth; Eugene O'Neill; leftist activist Jack Reed; NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's ruthless Red-chasing attorney general; cunning Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge; and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover.

Coursing through some of the pivotal events of the time—including the Spanish Influenza pandemic—and culminating in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, they gradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives.