Man Gone Down

"Powerful and moving . . . [Thomas] knows how the odds are stacked in America."-Kaiama L. Glover, New York Times Book Review (cover review)

A beautifully written and devastating first novel, Man Gone Down is the story of a young Black father in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has bargained on since youth

On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed Black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep the kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them in which to live. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we learn of a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it's like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to escape that sentence.

Michael Thomas's writing recalls some of the great American masters, including Ralph Ellison, but his debut is wholly and distinctly an original. Man Gone Down is a dazzling addition to the literature of and about America today.