FAREWELL STRANGER

A darkly comic Nabokovian novel about love, history, idealism, and self-delusion.

Lion (pronounced like the animal) Livingston is not looking forward to the new school year at the Bushwick Classical Academy. He has taught at this briefly ambitious, quickly failing, institution for the last eight years, and they’ve taken their toll: whatever spark might have been responsible for his becoming a teacher in the first place has long gone out. On top of which his wife, Simone, has finally had enough of his lack of ambition and left him for the rather more accomplished poet Sylvanus Shade. Lion, prepared to wallow in self-pity while trying to come up with an escape plan, doesn’t know that two people – a new teacher and a new student – are going to light up his life. The new teacher is Daniel Coffey, a self-declared expert on local history and an idealistic firebrand who refuses to breathe the air of defeatism that the rest of the teaching staff at Bushwick Classical are eagerly inhaling. The new student: Lilly Francis, a dangerously smart and attractive teenager whose young life has already taken several unhappy turns. Both Daniel and Lilly challenge Lion’s indifference and awaken… something in him. But when Lion begins to suspect that Daniel isn’t who he claims to be and might be drawing his star student into a hare-brained power-to-the-people scheme, he decides that he needs to protect Lilly – whatever the cost… Brilliantly conceived and executed, and filled with Brooklyn lore (that may or may not be entirely true), FAREWELL, STRANGER will be one the most talked-about literary debuts of recent years.