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This is a sprawling, epic story set in Boston at the beginning of the 20th century. Lehane's finely etched characters and riveting story easily elevate this novel into a magnificent classic. This is a grand tale of idealism and salvation compellingly told that will captivate any reader. Highest recommendation

Writers from Robert Lowell to Edwin O'Connor have long celebrated Boston's rich heritage in poetry and in prose. In many respects, the story of the city reflects the story of America, mirroring a violent, colorful, bigoted, brawling, literate and cultured history that has sprawled well over two centuries.

Boston has been the stage for most of Dennis Lehane's eight books, beginning with A Drink Before the War in 1994. An acclaimed film adaptation of Mystic River was directed by Clint Eastwood in 2003. Lehane's new novel, The Given Day, is set in the years immediately after World War I. It was a time when the city was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a balance as it teetered on the razor's edge of great social upheavals.

Like E. L. Doctoro's Ragtime, The Given Day is a near perfect union of riveting fact and a soaring imagination. Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge, John Reed, J. Edgar (then merely called John) Hoover, and Eugene O'Neill are seamlessly woven into the story. A devastating influenza pandemic that claimed 45,000 lives in Massachusetts and Boston's notorious Molasses Flood (inevitably, if falsely, blamed on anarchists) are also integrated into the panoramic narrative. The interjection of historical figures and events also serve to illustrate the prodigious amount of research that the author must have undertaken in order to lend his book such a distinctive air of credibility. This novel is a sweeping epic of historical fiction that can stand with the great books about Boston or, for that matter, about any city.

Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane's long-awaited eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads between past and future. Filled with a cast of unforgettable characters more richly drawn than any Lehane has ever created, The Given Day 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. Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.

Here, too, are some of the most influential figures of the era—Babe Ruth; Eugene O'Neill; leftist activist Jack Reed; NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's ruthless Red-chasing attorney general; cunning Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge; and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover.

Coursing through some of the pivotal events of the time—including the Spanish Influenza pandemic—and culminating in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, they gradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives.

Dennis Lehane is the author of seven novels. These include the New York Times bestsellers Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; and Shutter Island, as well as Coronado, a collection of short stories and a play. He and his wife, Angie, divide their time between Boston and the Gulf Coast of Florida.

720 pages