Welcome to Litsy!

From an American master comes another beautifully languid, emotionally intense tale (Entertainment Weekly), this time of a newspaper editor s fatefuldecision 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, onceserved 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, haunthim throughout a long career, as he moves first to Chicago, where he engages in a spiritedlove 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 thegorgeously limnedthemes running through Ward Just s elegiac and masterly new novel."