Synopses & Reviews
Now a major motion picture directed by Robert Redford and starring Shia LaBeouf, Susan Sarandon, Julie Christie, Terence Howard, Anna Kendrick, Nick Nolte, and Stanley Tucci
It is 2006. Seventeen-year-old Isabel Montgomery starts to receive emails from her father, a man who had abandoned her in a hotel room ten years ago when his past finally caught up with him. Why has he contacted her now? Because he needs her help and is finally ready to reveal the truth. Over the course of the next month, further emails arrive telling her more about her family's past. Isabel discovers that her father adopted a false identity in the hope of avoiding murder charges for a robbery gone wrong in 1974. By 1996, with a marriage falling apart around him, he is one last Vietnam-era fugitives still wanted by the law. When he is finally tracked down by a young newspaper reporter in search of a story he must abandon years of safe underground life in an attempt to exonerate himself. Set against the rise and fall of the radical anti-war group the Weather Underground, The Company You Keep is a sweeping American saga about sacrifice, the righteousness of youth, and the tension between political ideals and family loyalties.
Review
"A hybrid of political novel, love story, cat-and-mouse thriller . . . an addictive page-turner of a book" --
The Seattle Times "Cerebral, rousing . . . it bids well to enter the company of our best fiction about the Vietnam era." --The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
- The Company You Keep has been optioned by Robert Redford
Synopsis
With the publication of his highly praised first novel, Sacrifice of Isaac, called "breathtaking" (Boston Globe) and "ambitious and hugely entertaining" (The Washington Post), Neil Gordon proved himself a master of the intellectual thriller. In his new novel, Gordon mixes political turmoil and family drama to deliver a plot that is as intricate as it is compelling. Based on intensive research into the divisive events of the late sixties and the lives of Weather Underground radicals and Vietnam veterans, The Company You Keep is a story of the ecstatic righteousness of youth and the bonds of family love, of ideals betrayed by violence, and of love sacrificed to history. When his political past catches up with him, one man goes on the run again after thirty-odd years--this time not for political reasons, but for the love of his child. Again he becomes a fugitive, setting in motion an incredible American saga. Historically rich, morally complex, and emotionally engrossing, The Company You Keep is a dramatic and moving novel in the tradition of works by Tim O'Brien and Tobias Wolff.
Synopsis
Set against the rise and fall of the radical antiwar group the Weather Underground, The Company You Keep is a sweeping American saga about sacrifice, the ecstatic righteousness of youth, and the tension between political ideals and family loyalties. When Jason Sinai, one of the last Vietnam-era fugitives still wanted on murder charges for a robbery gone wrong in 1974, encounters a young newspaper reporter in search of a story, he must abandon years of safe underground life for the dangerous life of the road traveling across America and deep into his past. It is a vivid re-creation of lives lived undergroundof battle-scarred veterans, ideologues, profiteers, criminals, and bystanders.
About the Author
Neil Gordon is the literary editor of the Boston Review and a frequent book reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe.