The Company You Keep - Softcover

Gordon, Neil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143123874 ISBN 13: 9780143123873

Publisher: Penguin Group USA, 2013

Synopsis

Now a major motion picture directed by Robert Redford and starring Shia LaBeouf, Susan Sarandon, Julie Christie, Terence Howard, Anna Kendrick, Nick Nolte, and Stanley Tucci

It is 2006. Seventeen-year-old Isabel Montgomery starts to receive emails from her father, a man who had abandoned her in a hotel room ten years ago when his past finally caught up with him. Why has he contacted her now? Because he needs her help and is finally ready to reveal the truth. Over the course of the next month, further emails arrive telling her more about her family's past. Isabel discovers that her father adopted a false identity in the hope of avoiding murder charges for a robbery gone wrong in 1974. By 1996, with a marriage falling apart around him, he is one last Vietnam-era fugitives still wanted by the law. When he is finally tracked down by a young newspaper reporter in search of a story he must abandon years of safe underground life in an attempt to exonerate himself. Set against the rise and fall of the radical anti-war group the Weather Underground, The Company You Keep is a sweeping American saga about sacrifice, the righteousness of youth, and the tension between political ideals and family loyalties.

About this title

Review:

An astonishing tour de force, at once an intellectual, emotional and political thriller . . . an American novel in which plot characters and ideas are in perfect balance. By bringing the past alive, Gordon enables us to see more clearly where America stands now (San Francisco Chronicle)

Rousing, cerebral . . . Gordon's plot is a doozy - a trio of doozies, in fact - yet utterly credible. He projects wrenching political and personal drama onto a slightly futuristic version of where we stand now as a people. In doing so he shows how we got here . . . What makes this novel so compelling is not only the ideological spectrum it covers but its emotional chiaroscuro . . . It bids well to enter the company of our best fiction about the Vietnam era (New York Times)

The Company You Keep works as a thriller, but the adventures . . . are grounded firmly in larger political and moral issues, in this case the passionate conviction that the radical opposition in the '60s to the Vietnam War represented the high point of American idealism, the best dream America ever had . . . The characters speak with passion about serious moral issues, and they admit to us the intimate moments of their lives where the political and the personal intersect. The result is a compelling story (Los Angeles Times)

Gordon has intertwined fact and fiction as seamlessly as Don DeLillo did in Libra, his "factional" account of Kennedy's assignation . . . [A] precisely written swashbuckler, a serious, sometimes brilliant, always protean tale . . . lively [and] energetic (Washington Post)

Gripping (Chicago Tribune)

His characters are so skilfully drawn that they remain likeable and interesting, and their missives to Isabel are sincerely felt and compelling reads until the very last page (Boston Globe)

A hybrid of political novel, love story, cat-and-mouse-thriller . . . an addictive page-turner of a book (Seattle Times)

Gordon skilfully combines a tense fugitive procedural, full of intriguing lore about false identities and techniques for losing a tail, with nuanced exploration of boomer nostalgia and regret (Publishers Weekly)

Compelling and intricately plotted . . . Well-rendered and engaging political drama (Kirkus Reviews)

Book Description:

Now a major film starring Robert Redford, Shia LaBeouf and Julie Christie, and directed by Robert Redford.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Group USA
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0143123874
• ISBN 13: 9780143123873
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 406