The Given Day

Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane's long-awaited eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads between past and future. Filled with a cast of unforgettable characters more richly drawn than any Lehane has ever created, The Given Day tells the story of two families—one black, one white—swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power. Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.
Here, too, are some of the most influential figures of the era—Babe Ruth; Eugene O'Neill; leftist activist Jack Reed; NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's ruthless Red-chasing attorney general; cunning Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge; and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover.
Coursing through some of the pivotal events of the time—including the Spanish Influenza pandemic—and culminating in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, they gradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives.

Dennis Lehane is the author of thirteen novels—including the New York Times bestsellers Live by Night; Moonlight Mile; Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; and The Given Day—as well as Coronado, a collection of short stories and a play. He grew up in Boston, MA and now lives in California with his family.

ôPassionate and powerful. . . . That prologue is as fine a piece of writing as you are liable to come across this year, or maybe the next several, and it is also a great curtain-raiser for the latest work from a writer who is becoming, book by book, the foremost chronicler of social class in America. . . . How you talk, where you live, whether you rent or own your home, whom you vote for, where (and if) you work, how much money you have in the bankùthese are the things that fill up a soul, Lehane suggests. These are the elements that shape a destiny. Not just the color of your skin. Few contemporary American writers understand this the way Lehane does. Race, in many ways, has blinded us to the even stricter imperatives of class. . . . Lehane is trying to get his arms around the origins of modern America, the divide between red states and blue states, the great cultural cleaver that splits the country right down the middle. . . . THE GIVEN DAY is a massive, ambitious novel.ö (Chicago Tribune)