Book Description
Ethan Canin is one of America's finest writers. He has
been called "brilliant" by the Los Angeles
Times, "a tremendous talent by the Chicago
Sun-Times, and "dazzling" by Walker Percy. The
bestselling author of The Palace Thief and Emperor of the
Air now gives us this stunning new novel, For Kings and
Planets. "Years later, Orno Tarcher would think
of his days in New York as a seduction. A seduction and a
near miss, a time when his memory of the world around him
--the shining stone stairwells, the taxicabs, the sea of
nighttime lights--was glinting and of heroic proportion.
Like a dream." So begins this remarkable novel about
the lives of two young men and the women they love.
Orno Tarcher arrives in New York City from a small
town in Missouri, feeling unsophisticated and
disadvantaged by his family's bedrock values. He meets
Marshall Emerson, the charismatic gem of a worldly
family, a seductive and brilliant New Yorker who is
revealed, as time passes, to bent on destruction. The
novel explores with depth and sophistication the
conflicts of character at the heart of every life, the
desire for grandeur and the lure of normalcy, the tension
between rivalry and friendship, fathers and sons, love
and betrayal. For Kings and Planets is the story of a man
who thinks of himself as moral, who tests his character
against power, deception, and seduction. It is also the
story of a friendship fractured by love.
For Kings and Planets is a remarkable achievement,
another fiction classic by the writer who has been called
"a worthy successor to...Philip Roth, Elizabeth
Bishop, and Robert Penn Warren."
