A few weeks back, I was over at Mingei World Arts cooking up another hare-brained scheme with Ann Van Slyke, and her friend Sally Wylde, Decaturite was brimming with news she couldn't tell me. Intriguing indeed.
Well this weekend, she emailed to tell me she'd just returned from the UK, where her son-in-law, Michael Thomas, won the nicely lucrative Dublin Impac award. His wife is from these parts, and we are proud to claim him as an Atlantan by marriage. (The picture is him with the Mayor of Dublin, and some mighty bling.)
It couldn't have happened to a better book. The unnamed hero of Man Gone Down has a fantastic voice, and you can't help but feel the desperation in his all-too-familiar story of immediate personal and financial collapse. Published in 2007, the book is perfectly ripe for the summer of 2009.
If you missed it when it came out (and it wasn't for lack of trying from Grove/Atlantic, his publisher), time to circle back and get this one. A really fantastic book.