Boy from the North Country

“Sam Sussman is a courageous, honest, compassionate, generous writer, and Boy from the North Country is a remarkable novel. It’s a penetratingly observed exploration of loss and grief, healing and mortality, theology, philosophy, and above all, art–of art as origin and salvation, art as community, seduction, fame, power, holiness. Its language is unguardedly personal, at times uncomfortably intimate, accumulating over and over into moments of stunning poetic force, revelatory insight, heartbreak and wisdom.” -Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America“This novel has a haunting story to tell, and it tells it beautifully. It was a pleasure to read.” -Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments “Boy from the North Country is a debut novel of rare power, a page-turning story of a son learning to return his mother’s transformative love. Tragic and redemptive, poetic and provocative, this novel held me breathless at every turn. Sussman is a writer of many gifts.” -Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Today Will Be Different “Boy from the North Country reveals Bob Dylan at his most alive and inspired, as you have never seen him before. This book is a monumental event for anyone who cares about Dylan. More meaningfully, the book transforms into an emotionally moving story of what it means to love a mother and be a son. Sussman has written one of the Great Millennial Novels and proved himself an inheritor of Dylan’s lyrical tradition.” -David Yaffe, author of Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown “A dazzling book that promises everything and delivers more. Boy from the North Country is a beautifully written, emotionally nuanced portrait of a woman in all her complexity and courage.” -Aminatta Forna, author of The Devil That Danced on the Water

Sam Sussman grew up in the Hudson Valley. He graduated with a BA from Swarthmore College and an MPhil from the University of Oxford and has lived in Berlin and Jerusalem. His writing has been recognized by BAFTA and published in Harper’s Magazine. He lives in the Yorkville neighbourhood of Manhattan and his native Hudson Valley.