It sure sounds contemporary but The Given Day, Dennis Lehane’s wildly ambitious new novel, is set in Boston toward the end of World War I. (Sept.A war-fatigued nation confronts an overheated economy, a tangle of vengeful terrorist organizations, rising joblessness, and racial tension. In short, this nail-biter carries serious moral gravity. It's also a vision of redemption and a triumph of the human spirit. This story of fathers and sons, love and betrayal, idealism and injustice, prejudice and brotherly feeling is a dark vision of the brutality inherent in human nature and the dire fate of some who try to live by ethical standards. After Luther kills a man in Tulsa, he flees to Boston, where he becomes intertwined with Danny's family. Danny's counterpart in alienation is Luther Laurence, a spirited black man first encountered in the prologue when Babe Ruth sees him playing softball in Ohio.

Danny also rebels by falling in love with the family's spunky Irish immigrant maid, a woman with a past. He gradually finds himself sympathetic to those living in similar conditions to his fellow policemen, who earn wages well below the poverty line, work in filthy, rat-infested headquarters, are made to pay for their own uniforms and are not compensated for overtime.

Anxious to prove himself worthy of his legendary father, he agrees to go undercover to infiltrate the Bolsheviks and anarchists who are recruiting the city's poverty-stricken immigrants. Set in Boston during and after WWI, this engrossing epic brings alive a pivotal period in our cultural maturation through a pulsing narrative that exposes social turmoil, political chicanery and racial prejudice, and encompasses the Spanish flu pandemic, the Boston police strike of 1919 and red-baiting and anti-union violence.ĭanny Coughlin, son of police captain Thomas Coughlin, is a devoted young beat cop in Boston's teeming North End. ), Lehane combines 20th-century American history, a gripping story of a family torn by pride and the strictures of the Catholic Church, and the plot of a multifaceted thriller. In a splendid flowering of the talent previously demonstrated in his crime fiction ( Gone, Baby, Gone

Lehane the given day