Man Gone Down – Michael Thomas

Man Gone Down is the brilliant debut novel from Michael Thomas which recently won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

This book is an extraordinary debut that tackles race, wealth and family head on as a young black man finds the American Dream dissolving around him. On the eve of this thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend’s six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them to live in.

$21.61 RRP: $24.99 Save 14% $22.49 RRP: $22.49 Save 0% $22.46 RRP: $24.95 Save 10% Spend $50 for FREE delivery Spend $65 for FREE delivery $6.95 flat fee delivery

As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we discover a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it’s like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to escape that sentence.

Links and Further Reading

• Listen to Michael Thomas read the first chapter of Man Gone Down

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Read this book? – Leave a comment or review below.

Related posts:

1. Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon
2. Fugitive Blue – Claire Thomas
3. Hot, Flat, and Crowded – Thomas Friedman