Sam Sussman on his debut novel
A novel about the enduring love between a mother and son. A young man who leaves home in search of the father he never knew, only to realize that all he values in himself comes from the mother who raised him, whose courage and life choices he is slowly coming to understand. A dual origin story of mother and son, and a tribute to 1970s New York Jewish bohemia, this is a novel about understanding our origins.
A son returns home to his dying mother to discover the astonishing truth of his origins and the secrets of a woman whose life and wisdom he is only beginning to understand.
When Evan, twenty-six, is suddenly called home from his life abroad to the secluded farmhouse where he was raised by his mother, June, there is so much he does not yet know. He doesn’t know his mother is dying. He still doesn’t know the identity of his biological father or the elusive story of his mother’s creatively intense, emotionally turbulent romance with Bob Dylan, whom Evan reveres as an artist and whom strangers have long insisted he resembles. He doesn’t know the secrets of his mother’s life before he was born or what drove her to leave New York City for a completely different existence.
In this deeply moving debut novel, Sam Sussman writes one of the most tender and intimate mother–son relationships of our era. Caring for his mother as her illness worsens, and as she begins to tell him truths he has waited so long to hear, Evan comes to understand the startling gift this extraordinary woman has bequeathed him.
Inspired by the author’s own uncertain celebrity paternity, Boy from the North Country is an emotionally searing meditation on the most essential human themes: loss, healing, memory, and the redemptive power of love.
The central question of Boy from the North Country might be whether the protagonist Evan is the son of Bob Dylan, but the real heart of the novel is the tender relationship between Evan and his mother, June. With gorgeous language and a big-hearted spirit, Sam Sussman explores grief, love, loneliness, loss, and the possibility of healing. And throughout, the questions raised by this book are steeped in Jewish values, asking what we do with the legacies we are given and how we use them to shape who we become. Consider the power of the stories we tell—to each other and to ourselves.
