Ethan Canin has published several short story collections and some promising novels including the very fine Carry Me Across the Water, but he has moved up several notches with America America.

The funeral of a famous liberal senator in 2006 prompts the middle-aged publisher of a regional newspaper to revisit his youthful relationship with a powerful liberal family and his walk-on part in a scandal that destroyed the Democrats and guaranteed the re-election of Richard Nixon. Senator Bonwiller, anti-war Democrat and frontrunner in the 1972 presidential election, is a man of genuine public idealism, but he is also ruthless, delusionally vain – and a philanderer.

Switching between the sensibility of the 16-year-old, working-class, small-town boy mesmerised by contact with an aristocratic elite and the equally unreliable interpretations of the still credulous older man, we follow Bonwiller’s archetypal political trajectory from ‘the ritual of deference … to the auction of influence … to the orgy of slaughter’. Vietnam, Watergate, the racial and cultural wars of the 60s and 70s provide the deep but almost unspoken context for this story.

This is a rich and multi-layered rumination on power and personality, history and memory, on family and loyalty, and on the now virtually unmentionable idea of class. America America is a big book in all senses and will no doubt be a contender for major US literary prizes. For me, it’s the novel of the year.