CHRISTOPHER SORRENTINO discusses his newest book THE FUGITIVES, with JONATHAN LETHEM

The Fugitives (Simon & Schuster)

From National Book Award finalist Christopher Sorrentino, a bracing, kaleidoscopic look at love and obsession, loyalty and betrayal, race and identity, compulsion and free will.

Sandy Mulligan is in trouble. To escape his turbulent private life and the scandal that's maimed his public reputation, he's retreated from Brooklyn to the quiet Michigan town where he hopes to finish his long-overdue novel. There, he becomes fascinated by John Salteau, a native Ojibway storyteller who regularly appears at the local library. But Salteau is not what he appears to be, a fact suspected by Kat Danhoff, an ambitious Chicago reporter of elusive ethnic origins who arrives to investigate a theft from a nearby Indian-run casino. Salteau's possible role in the crime could be the key to the biggest story of her stalled career. Bored, emotionally careless, and sexually reckless, Kat s sudden appearance in town immediately attracts a restive Sandy. 

As the novel weaves among these characters uncovering the conflicts and contradictions between their stories, we learn that all three are fugitives of one kind or another, harboring secrets that threaten to overturn their invented lives and the stories they tell to spin them into being. In their growing involvement, each becomes a pawn in the others games all of them just one mistake from losing everything. 

Moving, funny, tense, and mysterious, The Fugitives is at once a love story, a ghost story, and a crime thriller. It is also a cautionary tale of twenty-first century American life a meditation on the meaning of identity, on the role storytelling plays in our understanding of ourselves and each other, and on the difficulty of making genuine connections in a world that's connected in almost every way. 

Praise for The Fugitives

"The language of The Fugitives is at once remarkable, startling and invisible. I was completely sucked into the worlds of these characters. It takes a master to make me forget I'm holding a book. Well, I forgot that for more than 300 pages.Brilliant."--Percival Everett 

"A powerful and fiercely unsentimental novel that blazes past all the well-worn pieties about love and loss and leaves them in ashes."--Jenny Offill

“Sorrentino's smartly conceived story is something of a thriller, though more Richard Russo than Robert Ludlum; it's about ruses and masks and our desire to be something other than our imperfectible selves . . . Thoughtful but full of action—and a pleasing entertainment, too.” – Kirkus Reviews

Christopher Sorrentino is the author of five books, including the National Book Award Finalist Trance. His work has appeared in Esquire, Granta, Harper's, The New York Times, Tin House, and many other publications. He lives in New York City.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven novels including Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which was named Novel of the Year by Esquire and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award, as well as the Macallan Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger. He has also written two short story collections, a novella and a collection of essays, edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year's Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence magazine. His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney's and many other periodicals.