Brilliant . . . this novel shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights. . . . The Boy in His Winter is a glorious meditation on justice, truth, loyalty, story, and the alchemical effects of love, a reminder of our capacity to be changed by the continuously evolving world ‘when it strikes fire against the mind’s flint,’ and by profoundly moving novels like this.
The Boy in His Winter
Huck Finn and Jim float on their raft across a continuum of shifting seasons, feasting on a limitless supply of fish and stolen provisions, propelled by the currents of the mighty Mississippi from one adventure to the next. Launched into existence by Mark Twain, they have now been transported by Norman Lock through three vital, violent, and transformative centuries of American history. As time unfurls on the river’s banks, they witness decisive battles of the Civil War, the betrayal of Reconstruction’s promises to the freed slaves, the crushing of Native American nations, and the electrification of a continent. While Jim enters real time when he disembarks the raft in the Jim Crow South, Huck finally comes of age when he’s washed up on shore during Hurricane Katrina. An old man in 2077, Huck takes stock of his life and narrates his own story, revealing our nation’s past, present, and future as Mark Twain could never have dreamed it.
The first stand-alone book in The American Novels series, The Boy in His Winter is a tour-de-force work of imagination, beauty, and courage that re-envisions a great American literary classic for our time.
Reader’s Digest “Great Books from Small Presses” selection
Huffington Post “Best New Book” selection
Publishers Weekly & Spartanburg Herald-Journal Escape “Pick of the Week” selection
Library Journal “Discoveries” selection
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781934137765
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781934137772
Norman Lock talks to Scott Simon on NPR Weekend Edition, and with The Rumpus and Playwrights Theatre of NJ about Mark Twain, Huck Finn, and how his own experience during Hurricane Sandy inspired The Boy in His Winter.
Listen to Norman Lock read from The Boy in His Winter at The Author’s Corner on Public Radio.
“Ransacking memory’s drawers will not suffice; one must consult sources to get the history and the scenography right.” Norman Lock shares his “Research Notes” for The Boy in His Winter with Necessary Fiction.
Preview The Boy in His Winter in Shelf Unbound.
Norman Lock is the award-winning author of the dozen volumes in The American Novels series, as well as other novels, short fiction, poetry, and stage and radio plays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and has been longlisted twice for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He has also received writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.
visit author page »Praise for The Boy in His Winter
[Lock] is one of the most interesting writers out there. This time, he re-imagines Huck Finn’s journeys, transporting the iconic character deep into America’s past—and future.
— Reader’s Digest
Boldly reimagines Huck Finn. . . . Striking and original. . . . The premise may be an outlandish brain-twister that takes risks with a sacred American myth, but the vessel stays afloat by virtue of [Lock’s] wily ingenuity.
— Atlanta Journal-Constitution
To call [The Boy in His Winter] a work of fiction is to tell only part of the story. This book is as much a treatise on memory and time and the nature of storytelling and our collective national conscience . . . much of it wildly funny and extremely intelligent.
— Star Tribune
Norman Lock is a master of the unusual. Cast through his inimitable creative lens, [The Boy in His Winter] is much more than a unique concept. It’s a rich, textured story that’ll leave you unsteady on your feet, as any great water adventure should.
— Slice magazine
Hypnotic. . . . A delightful and profound journey.
— Flavorwire
Remarkable. . . . Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth. They merge with an iconic American character, tall tales intact, to create something entirely new—an American fable of ideas.
An eclectic hybrid of literary appropriation, Zelig-like historical narrative, time-travel tale and old-style picaresque.
— Kirkus Reviews
I read Norman Lock’s The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain’s original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy—and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America’s greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive.
— David M. Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Polio: An American Story and Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
In this surreal and otherworldly river journey through time, Norman Lock transports Huck Finn down the Mississippi and deep into America’s history—and future. Elegant and imaginative, The Boy in His Winter is a tale that’s as hypnotic as it is profound.
— Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
The Boy in His Winter is delightful, glorious. It is less a book one merely reads than itself a river one allows oneself to be borne along in, carried in currents and eddies, lured to false banks and sunken towns and so forth. The places Huck/Albert winds up—in the yacht industry, Googling the world’s rivers, and finally impersonating his nemesis—seem so perfect, yet each one serves as a burst of surprise. And, of course, the sentences—what is one to say about them except that Lock is one of our great miniaturists, to be read only a single time at one’s peril. I will recommend it to every reader I know.
— Tim Horvath, author of Understories
The voice of Huck Finn is so vivid and felt in this novel one loses the sense there’s an author behind it. . . . [The Boy in His Winter] is a testament to friendship, sharing, a slow life derailed and a look at America from a truly unique perspective. Huck is unforgettable and this book then even more so.
— Sheryl Cotleur, Copperfield’s Books (Northern California’s Sonoma County)
In Norman Lock’s imaginative and brilliant riff on Twain’s great American novel, Huck tells us his new stories and does not leave us until he is an old man in 2077, inviting us to recall the original novel and to review American history with a fresh eye. . . . This is a provocative and challenging book.
— Carole Goldberg, Hartford Public Library
I read a short excerpt and was immediately hooked. . . . I’m no time traveler myself, but the novel has all the makings of a wonderful film, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re placing your hold on the DVD in a few years, too.
— Karen McBride, Barrington Area Library in the Barrington Courier-Review