The Lincoln Highway

From that swerve Amor Towles builds a picaresque of unusual warmth, handing the narration to a rotating cast whose voices - earnest, scheming, wounded, grandiose - give the book its buoyancy. The Lincoln Highway is a road novel that runs, cannily, in the wrong direction, and Towles uses the reversal to meditate on debts, detours and the American faith in reinvention.

Beneath the momentum runs a well-read intelligence, with nods to classical journeys and boyhood adventure stories worn lightly enough never to slow the ride. Readers who prize character and craftsmanship will find a novel engineered for pleasure yet serious about consequence.