“Lock’s novels all use a classic work of American literature as a leaping-off point. . . . His newest leverages Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in the story of Sam Long, an escaped slave who makes his way to New England in the 1840s, where he falls in with a group of abolitionist intellectuals, Thoreau among them. Long captures the distinct personalities of these famous thinkers with uncanny ease, and never loses sight of the gulf that yawns between Long and the people who supposedly regard him as an equal.”