Leo Nolan’s mother’s dying request was that Leo track down her long-lost brother, Jack. Divorced and depressed, Leo uses his vacation to follow a route Jack described in letters home in 1934. Curiously, these letters are only now, half a century later, arriving in his father’s mailbox. The letters lead Leo to the ugly, dilapidated streets of Ashland, Kentucky, where he finds and moves into the hotel where Jack lived. Mysteriously drawn to a stranger on the street late one night, Leo meets and befriends a still-young Jack. Then, as inexplicably as the appearance of the long-delayed letters, Leo finds himself in 1934, enmeshed in Jack’s desperate bank-robbery plot. Green weaves history, fantasy, and mystery into a delicate web but maintains the magic of his story by not trying to explain too much. This is a jewel of a novel, sensitively told and filled with fascinating characters.
 
 

George Needham