Plano Reads: Join Second Tuesday Book Club on ‘The Lincoln Highway’ on September 12

Please join Second Tuesday Book Club in September to discuss Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway, which tells the story of Emmett and Billy’s amazing and eventful road trip across the United States in June 1954–will they reach California as planned, or will they find themselves on journey unlike anything they could have imagined? We will find out what happens to both boys, and all the characters they discover along the way…

We will meet in person from 7 to 8:15 p.m. on Tuesday, September 12, in the program room at Schimelpfenig Library. Please email Cathe Spencer at cathes@plano.gov, or call Schimelpfenig Library at 972-769-4200, if you have questions or comments. See you soon!

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

Available as Print | Large Print | eBook | eAudiobook

In June 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California. But when Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the car, they hatch an altogether different plan, one that will take them all on a fateful 10-day journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York.

From Amor Towles comes a big new novel praised in the New York Times Book Review as “mischievous, wise and wildly entertaining,” featuring the kind of “the kind of episodic, exuberant narrative haywire found in myth or epic.”

Chris Bachelder’s review in the New York Times Book Review continues, “Not reaching the intended destination becomes entirely the point and power… The novel opens wide, detours beget detours, the point of view expands and rotates … The Lincoln Highway is remarkably brisk, remarkably buoyant. Though dark shadows fall across its final chapters, the book is permeated with light, wit, youth” on every page.

Alex Preston, writing the the UK’s The Observer, praises “Towles’ near-magical gift for storytelling, his ability to construct a cast of characters at once flawed, lovable and fascinating … Towles gives us what all great road novels give us: the panoramic sweep of the prairies and hills, adventures that seem to spring from the landscape itself, the propulsive rhythm of the road. The novel is told through multiple perspectives and each is as engaging and fully realized as the next.”

Kirkus‘ reviewer calls The Lincoln Highway “a modern picaresque with a host of characters, competing points of view, wandering narratives, and teasing chapter endings, and a remarkable blend of sweetness and doom. Towles’ novel is packed with revelations about the American myth, the art of storytelling, and the unrelenting pull of history. An exhilarating ride through Americana.”

Amor Towles is the author of three very successful novels: Rules of Civility (2011), A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), and The Lincoln Highway (2021). He was born in Boston in 1964, and is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford University, where he earned an MA in English. He worked in finance and investments until 2012, but now writes full-time. He has also written essays and short fiction, and lives with his family in Manhattan.

For more information about his work, see his website, amortowles.com. He also posts on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and has several videos on The Lincoln Highway on YouTube.