The Broken King

by Michael Thomas

Overview

“There’s a bridge of beautiful American prose—lyrical, powerful, fearlessly candid—running straight from James Baldwin to Thomas, who is obviously Baldwin’s worthy heir . . . An utterly immersive book.”—Francisco Goldman, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Monkey Boy

From the author of Man Gone Down—a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award—comes a deeply personal memoir of race, trauma, alcoholism, parenting, mental illness and ultimately hope in a portrait of three generations of Black American men

In 2007, Michael Thomas launched into the literary world with his award-winning first novel Man Gone Down, a beautiful and devastating story of a Black father trying to claim a piece of the American Dream. Called “powerful and moving . . . an impressive success,” by Kaiama L. Glover on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Thomas’ debut introduced a writer of prodigious and rare talent. In his long-awaited encore and first work of nonfiction, The Broken King, Thomas explores fathers and sons, lovers and the beloved, trauma and recovery, success and failure in a unique, urgent, and timeless memoir. 

The title is borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s line in “Little Gidding”: “If you came at night like a broken king,” and the work ponders the process of being broken. Akin to Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time or Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Thomas’ memoir unfolds through six powerful, interlocking and overlaying parts focusing on the lives of five men: his father—a philosopher, Boston Red Sox fan, and absent parent; his estranged older brother; his two sons growing up in Brooklyn; and always, heartbreakingly himself. At the center of The Broken King is the story of Thomas’ own breakdown, a result of inherited family history and his own experiences, from growing up Black in the Boston suburbs to publishing a prize-winning novel with “the house of Beckett.”  

Every page of The Broken King rings with the impact of America’s sweeping struggle with race and class, education and family, and builds to a brave, meticulous articulation of a creative mind’s journey into and out of madness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802120144
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	08/05/2025
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael Thomas is the author of the national bestseller Man Gone Down, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, The New York Times, and in Ben George’s anthology The Book of Dads. He is a professor of English at Hunter College. He lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Broken King

“Michael Thomas has written a truly extraordinary memoir, one that sears and sings with such terrible, beautiful honesty it will burn its way deep into your bones. The Broken King is a book for now, but feels like it’s always been part of the world in the way only great literature does. This hardscrabble lyric masterpiece is funny and brutal, soaring and chthonic. A triumph, and reading it will leave you changed. It’s genuinely one of the most extraordinary and magical books I have ever read. I’m full of awe.” —Helen Macdonald, New York Times bestselling author of H Is for Hawk

“Lord knows, Michael Thomas has paid some dues. He writes on the perils of being Black in America; the sorrows of damaged family; struggles with a self-destructive and treacherous self; of love, work, and ambition; of a mixed-race marriage and of fatherhood with its wondrous mysteries, terrors, joys. There's a bridge of beautiful American prose—lyrical, powerful, fearlessly candid—running straight from James Baldwin to Thomas, who is obviously Baldwin’s worthy heir. But The Broken King also harkens back to Melville, Emerson, and spans our own time too, as if in transatlantic conversation with Knausgaard. Like all those titans, Thomas writes about the struggle to be a man, and, simply and most complexly, on how to live. An utterly immersive book.“ —Francisco Goldman, author of Pulitzer Prize-finalist Monkey Boy

“By turns raw and lyrical, captivating and vexing, The Broken King is vivid testament to the damage wrought by personal and generational trauma—and to the power of art to lay bare what cannot otherwise be said.” —Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House

“The Broken King is a radically vulnerable story about men—Black men—fathers and sons, brothers and keepers. We know how these stories end—and yet here, in these pages, these passed-down wounds are transformed into brilliance, beauty, a map of survival.” —Danzy Senna, author of Colored Television

“The Broken King is one of the most harrowing, heartbreaking, and stunningly written books I’ve ever read: a flat-out brilliant memoir that reads like a psychological thriller. Michael Thomas uses his immense skill as a novelist to summon vivid scenes from throughout his life as he explores the racial chasm that is our broken nation and the darkest corridors of his own mind. As he grapples with how to be a son, brother, husband, and father, Thomas creates a love story that is especially poignant coming from a man who believes he has only ever been able to express love in retrospect—and yet who has written a beautiful work overflowing with love.” —Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club

“With candor and poetic grace, Michael Thomas's The Broken King invites readers on a deeply personal journey through race, resilience, and family—an unforgettable memoir that feels both intimate and universal.” —Paul Yamazaki, City Lights Booksellers

Praise for Man Gone Down

“Powerful and moving . . . An impressive success . . . [Thomas] knows how the odds are stacked in America. He knows the unlikelihood of successful black fatherhood. He knows that things are set up to keep the Other poor and the poor in their place. More than anything else, he knows how little but also—fortunately—how much it can take to bring a man down.” —Kaiama L. Glover, New York Times Book Review in a front page review

“[A] jazzy, sinewy debut . . . Thomas’s urgent, quicksilver prose makes even the darkest moments of this novel shine.” —Cathleen Medwich, O: The Oprah Magazine

“A ravishing blues for the soul’s unending loneliness.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“The narrator’s hard-bitten realism and Thomas’s blues-dirge-y storytelling instincts keep the narrative thrumming.” —Jonathan Durbin, People

“Ambitious . . . The book is filled with some virtuoso passages that expose the subtle degrees of racism in the narrator's world.” —Kirkus Reviews

“What a novel, and what a writer. Michael Thomas is brilliant, and Man Gone Down is riveting. Every page vibrates with love and anger and hope.” —Elizabeth Gaffney, author of Metropolis

“Thomas’s knack for bonding the reader with a number of New York characters is admirable, and the narrator’s thoughts about his marriage, work and racial tension are as graceful as they are blunt . . . Thomas’s subtle prose casts a new light on urban life in Brooklyn––even if you already live there.” —Cherie Dennis, Time Out New York

“Like the characters of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, whom [Thomas] references throughout the novel with recognizable phrases, themes and quotes, [the] unnamed narrator is a black man concerned with identity in a decidedly white America . . . Thomas imbues the story with an intense pace and urgency as he explores masculinity, humanity and where the narrator – a self-proclaimed ‘social experiment’ – fits in . . . In the end, the novel itself is rather like its main character: a brilliant and frustrating social experiment that is still quite worthy of our attention.” —Tina McElroy Ansa, Washington Post

“A real uncertainty haunts Man Gone Down and its landscapes, sticking to their edges. It captures human flux.” —Tess Taylor, San Francisco Chronicle

“Michael Thomas’ Man Gone Down moves along nicely. His unnamed narrator is broke, estranged from his wife and children and temporarily living in a friend’s child’s room, while desperately trying to figure out his life. This debut has racism at its core, but there’s much more to it than that.”—Martin Zimmerman, San Diego Union Tribune

From the Publisher

11/01/2013
Tracing the men of his family across 150 broken and bloody years, International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner Thomas steeps this memoir in dreams deferred ("does it dry up…?") as much as he does history. A powerful statement about race, inheritance, and trauma.

Library Journal