The Eastern Shore
Books / Hardcover
Books › Fiction › Historical › General
ISBN: 0544836588 / Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 2016
From an American master comes another &;beautifully languid, emotionally intense tale&; (Entertainment Weekly), this time of a newspaper editor&;s fateful decision to expose a small-town fugitive.
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From an American master comes another &;beautifully languid, emotionally intense tale&; (Entertainment Weekly), this time of a newspaper editor&;s fateful decision to expose a small-town fugitive. Ned Ayres, the son of a judge in an Indiana town in midcentury America, has never wanted anything but a newspaper career&;in his father&;s appalled view, a &;junk business,&; a way of avoiding responsibility. The defining moment comes early, when Ned is city editor of his hometown paper. One of his beat reporters fields a tip: William Grant, the town haberdasher, married to the bank president&;s daughter and father of two children, once served six years in Joliet. The story runs&;Ned offers no resistance to his publisher's argument that the public has a right to know. The consequences, swift and shocking, haunt him throughout a long career, as he moves first to Chicago, where he engages in a spirited love affair that cannot, in the end, compete with the pull of the newsroom&;&;never lonely, especially when it was empty&;&;and the &;subtle beauty&; of the front page. Finally, as the editor of a major newspaper in post-Kennedy-era Washington, DC, Ned has reason to return to the question of privacy and its many violations&;the gorgeously limned themes running through Ward Just&;s elegiac and masterly new novel.
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