“Hitch onto this delightful tour de force and you’ll be pulled straight through to the end, helpless against the inventive exuberance of Towles’ storytelling. Towles has snipped off a minuscule strand of existence-10 wayward days-and when we look through his lens we see that this brief interstice teems with stories, grand as legends.” - New York Times Book Review

“ mischievous, wise and wildly entertaining novel. When you aren’t actually reading the book, you’ll be worrying about the characters, so you might as well stay in your chair and keep reading.” -Ann Patchett Set over the course of ten riveting days, the story of these four boys unfolds, refolds, tears, and is taped back together. “Welcome to the enormous pleasure that is The Lincoln Highway, a big book of camaraderie and adventure in which the miles fly by and the pages turn fast. An absorbing, exhilarating ride, The Lincoln Highway is a novel as vivid, sweeping, and moving as readers have come to expect from Towles’s work. Spanning ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel is a multilayered tale of misadventure and self-discovery, populated by an eclectic cast of characters, from drifters who make their home riding the rails and larger-than-life vaudevillians to the aristocrats of the Upper East Side. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future, one that will take the four of them on a fateful journey in the opposite direction to the city of New York. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew.īut when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm-the wily, charismatic Duchess and earnest, offbeat Woolly-have stowed away in the trunk of the warden’s car. In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter.

The lincoln highway book summary