Welcome to Litsy!

From an American master comes another �beautifully languid, emotionally intense tale� (Entertainment Weekly), this time of a newspaper editor�s fateful decision to expose a small-town fugitive. Ned Ayres, the son of a judge in an Indiana town in midcentury America, has never wanted anything but a newspaper career�in his father�s appalled view, a �junk business,� a way of avoiding responsibility. The defining moment comes early, when Ned is city editor of his hometown paper. One of his beat reporters fields a tip: William Grant, the town haberdasher, married to the bank president�s daughter and father of two children, once served six years in Joliet. The story runs�Ned offers no resistance to his publisher's argument that the public has a right to know. The consequences, swift and shocking, haunt him throughout a long career, as he moves first to Chicago, where he engages in a spirited love affair that cannot, in the end, compete with the pull of the newsroom��never lonely, especially when it was empty��and the �subtle beauty� of the front page. Finally, as the editor of a major newspaper in post-Kennedy-era Washington, DC, Ned has reason to return to the question of privacy and its many violations�the gorgeously limned themes running through Ward Just�s elegiac and masterly new novel.