Winner of the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
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 his kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them to live in. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we discover 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.
One of the Ten Best Books of the Year - The New York Times Book Review
'Vivid, graphic and poignant'
Washington Post
'Powerful and moving . . . An impressive success'
New York Times Book Review
'[A] jazzy, sinewy debut . . . Thomas's urgent, quicksilver
prose makes even the darkest moments of this novel
shine'
O' the Oprah Magazine
