' The best new writer of fiction in America The best' John Irving Meet Samuel stalled writer bored teacher at a local college obsessive player of online video games He hasn't seen his mother Faye in decades not since she abandoned her family when he was a boy Now she has suddenly reappeared having committed an absurd politically motivated crime that electrifies the nightly news beguiles the Internet & inflames a divided America The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past but as far as Samuel knows his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart Which version of his mother is true? Two facts are certain she's facing some serious charges & she needs Samuel's help As Samuel begins to excavate his mother's
- & his country's
- history the story moves from the rural Midwest of the 1960s to New York City during Occupy Wall Street back to Chicago in 1968 & finally to wartime Norway home of the mysterious Nix Samuel will unexpectedly find that he has to rethink everything he ever knew about his mother
- a woman with an epic story of her own a story she has kept hidden from the world