Boy from the North Country
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A fiction finalist for the 75th National Jewish Book Awards
“This portrait of a young man caring for his mother is a rare combination of boldface intrigue and profound emotion.” —Oprah Daily, The Best Fall Books of 2025
“Come for the riveting father-son mystery, stay for the most beautiful and moving mother-son story in recent memory.” —Kirkus (starred review)
A son returns home to his dying mother to discover the astonishing truth of his origins and the secrets of a woman whose life and wisdom he is only beginning to understand
When Evan, twenty-six, is suddenly called home from his life abroad to the secluded farmhouse where he was raised by his mother, June, there is so much he does not yet know. He doesn’t know his mother is dying. He still doesn’t know the identity of his biological father or the elusive story of his mother’s creatively intense, emotionally turbulent romance with Bob Dylan, whom Evan reveres as an artist and whom strangers have long insisted he resembles. He doesn’t know the secrets of his mother’s life before he was born or what drove her to leave New York City for a completely different existence.
In this deeply moving debut novel, Sam Sussman writes one of the most tender and intimate mother-son relationships of our era. Caring for his mother as her illness worsens, and as she begins to tell him truths he has waited so long to hear, Evan comes to understand the startling gift this extraordinary woman has bequeathed him.
Inspired by the author’s own uncertain celebrity paternity, Boy from the North Country is an emotionally searing meditation on the most essential human themes: loss, healing, memory, and the redemptive power of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A man convinced he could be Bob Dylan's son returns home to care for his ailing mother in Sussman's gorgeous autobiographical debut. Evan Klausner, a 26-year-old aspiring writer, is devastated when his strong-willed mother, June, announces she has ovarian cancer, and he returns home to the Hudson Valley from London to take care of her. Over the course of the novel, he becomes fascinated by the stories she tells him while she recovers from chemotherapy, about her bohemian life in the Manhattan art world of the 1970s as a painter, actor, and lover and muse to Dylan, whom she last saw less than a year before Evan was born. When Evan asks if Dylan is his father, June is coy, and his imagination races. By the time Evan learns of June's terminal prognosis, she only has weeks remaining. In poetic narration interwoven with Dylan's lyrics, Evan expresses how the musician's songs inspired him to lead a wandering and creative life. "Possibility coursed through me," he remembers of being a teenager and hearing Dylan singing "I want you, I want you so bad" on a CD in his bedroom. At the novel's heart, though, is Sussman's intense portrait of a mother and son's emotional bond. It's a stunner. Agents: Peter Steinberg and Yona Levin, UTA.
