Our Take

Amor Towles has a gift that is rarer than it sounds: he writes novels that are genuinely pleasurable to read without sacrificing an ounce of intelligence or craft. The Lincoln Highway is his most kinetic book — structured around ten days and multiple viewpoints, it moves with the momentum of a thriller while doing the careful character work of literary fiction. The result is a novel that earns its 592 pages without ever feeling padded.

The ensemble is one of Towles's finest achievements. Emmett is a grounded, sympathetic center, but it is the characters around him — including young Billy, whose worldview is shaped entirely by the heroes of history and literature — who give the book its texture and its heart. Towles has a particular talent for writing characters who operate according to their own internal logic, however skewed, and that talent is on full display here.

Readers who fell for the wit and warmth of Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow will find much to love, as will fans of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys for its portrait of mid-century America's promises and betrayals. A big, generous, beautifully constructed novel — the kind that reminds you why you love reading in the first place.