The Lincoln Highway (2021) is a road-trip narrative set in 1954 America, spanning a timeline of ten days and 1,500 miles across the country. Packed into ten short days is the story of four boys’ journeys to find their respective futures, as Emmett and Billy set out to California for a new start, while Duchess and Woolly head for New York to claim Woolly’s rightful inheritance. Emmett and Billy’s plan is quickly derailed when Duchess and Woolly, escaped former inmates at the juvenile detention facility from which Emmett was recently released, show up and steal Emmett’s car for their journey.
The Lincoln Highway is the third novel by Amor Towles, and has been named a Book of the Year by Time Magazine and NPR. It was named the best book of 2021 by Amazon, beating out other titles such as Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart and Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara in the Sun. It has also been endorsed by notable public figures such as Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
NPR has praised the novel as “elegantly constructed and compulsively readable,” citing in particular the complexity and depth of Towles’s plot. The novel is also an experiment in form, as Towles vacillates between the limited third-person perspective and a close first-person for different characters. The substitution of em-dashes in place of quotation marks for dialogue also marks Towles’s second time with the format following Rules of Civility.
