The Given Day
A Novel
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4.5 • 15 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Gut-wrenching force...A majestic, fiery epic. The Given Day is a huge, impassioned, intensively researched book that brings history alive." - The New York Times Dennis Lehane, the New York Times bestselling author of Live by Night—now a Warner Bros. movie starring Ben Affleck—offers an unflinching family epic that captures the political unrest of a nation caught between a well-patterned past and an unpredictable future. This beautifully written novel of American history tells the story of two families—one black, one white—swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power at the end of World War I.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If this historical epic from Dennis Lehane teaches us anything about American history, it’s that the challenges we face today are nothing new. In 1918, young Boston cop Danny Coughlin is manipulated by his police captain dad and a young J. Edgar Hoover into infiltrating the police department’s still-forming union. Meanwhile, Luther Laurence, a Black amateur baseball player, flees Tulsa for Boston under shady circumstances and winds up working for Danny’s father. What follows is a suspenseful story full of blackmail, betrayal, and changing allegiances. Lehane’s historical details are as on point as the novel’s themes of corruption, class conflict, and racism. He has an amazing talent for creating settings so real, you feel like you’re right there. The Given Day is such an exciting read, you won’t realize how much history you’ve learned until it’s over.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a splendid flowering of the talent previously demonstrated in his crime fiction (Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River), Lehane combines 20th-century American history, a gripping story of a family torn by pride and the strictures of the Catholic Church, and the plot of a multifaceted thriller. Set in Boston during and after WWI, this engrossing epic brings alive a pivotal period in our cultural maturation through a pulsing narrative that exposes social turmoil, political chicanery and racial prejudice, and encompasses the Spanish flu pandemic, the Boston police strike of 1919 and red-baiting and anti-union violence.Danny Coughlin, son of police captain Thomas Coughlin, is a devoted young beat cop in Boston's teeming North End. Anxious to prove himself worthy of his legendary father, he agrees to go undercover to infiltrate the Bolsheviks and anarchists who are recruiting the city's poverty-stricken immigrants. He gradually finds himself sympathetic to those living in similar conditions to his fellow policemen, who earn wages well below the poverty line, work in filthy, rat-infested headquarters, are made to pay for their own uniforms and are not compensated for overtime. Danny also rebels by falling in love with the family's spunky Irish immigrant maid, a woman with a past. Danny's counterpart in alienation is Luther Laurence, a spirited black man first encountered in the prologue when Babe Ruth sees him playing softball in Ohio. After Luther kills a man in Tulsa, he flees to Boston, where he becomes intertwined with Danny's family. This story of fathers and sons, love and betrayal, idealism and injustice, prejudice and brotherly feeling is a dark vision of the brutality inherent in human nature and the dire fate of some who try to live by ethical standards. It's also a vision of redemption and a triumph of the human spirit. In short, this nail-biter carries serious moral gravity.
