The Third Brother: A Novel

by Nick McDonell

Overview

A haunting and “compulsively readable” tale of brotherly love, family tragedy, and national grief from the bestselling author of Twelve (Booklist).

Mike was a lucky child: a vacation house on Long Island, famous family friends, an Ivy League education, and an older brother, Lyle, who looked out for him. Now it’s 2001, and Mike is working in Thailand on a magazine internship. Sent on assignment to Bangkok, Mike finds the city electric with violence and hedonism. Nothing goes according to plan. When terrible news about his brother arrives from home, Mike rushes back to the States. Lyle is unstable and suffering from visions of an imaginary third brother. And then, a clear September morning is broken by catastrophe.

While the Twin Towers burn, Mike makes an epic trek through the ghostly streets of New York to find and save Lyle. From Patpong to the World Trade Center to Harvard Yard, as his life and country come apart, Mike struggles to find his footing and go on. The joke, it turns out, is on him.

“[McDonell’s] treatment of the 9/11 catastrophe is masterly.”—The Washington Post

“Engrossing, with indelible scenes and a protagonist to care about.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555846862
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/26/2020
Series:	Books That Changed the World
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Nick McDonell was born in 1984 in New York City.William Dufris has been nominated nine times as a finalist for the APA's prestigious Audie Award and has garnered twenty-one Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine, which also named him one of the Best Voices at the End of the Century. He has also acted on stage and television in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Editorial Reviews

Mr. McDonell writes best about the precise dynamics of class, loneliness and spiritual decay.
— The New York Times

Janet Maslin

McDonell, who at 17 made a splash with his debut, Twelve (2002), delivers an assured and heartfelt second. The narrator, Mike, 19 when we first meet him, works as an intern for an English language news magazine in Hong Kong. It's a job he got because managing editor Elliot Analect is an old Harvard friend of his fathers's. It's a job that pretty much bores Mike silly, so that he jumps at the chance to go to Bangkok to help research a story on back-packing kids and their drugs of choice. " 'Just don't get arrested,' " his boss tells him. He almost does, and on one occasion he's almost killed. Much that happens to him in Thailand is unsettling, nightmarish even, but what calls him home is worse. Mike's is a family on the far side of dysfunctional-both parents alcoholics, a brother whose hold on emotional equilibrium is tentative to say the least. And yet he loves them, and when they can, they love him back. Rich, talented, charming-he thinks of them as a "catalog people, handsome and expensive"-they have made his growing up both pain- and pleasure-filled. He returns from Asia because tragedy has struck, forcing him into a complex and unwelcome role-his older brother's keeper. Most of Part Two is devoted to the horror of 9/11, understatedly but brilliantly reported, as Mike, fearing that Lyle, his brother, might be one of those trapped, works his way toward a devastated downtown. Part Three is a kind of coda, a squaring up, as Mike, now 21, attempts to come to terms with life's savagery. Engrossing, with indelible scenes and a protagonist to care about.

Kirkus Reviews