Amor Towles' new book is about a road trip that takes more than a few U-turns

NPR's Book of the Day

NPR

Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2021

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Amor Towles' new book is quite the joyride — The Lincoln Highway follows four kids in a 1948 Studebaker who set out along the real-life Lincoln Highway, the first highway to cross the country. Two of them are trying to head for San Francisco to find their mother — the other two want to go the other way, looking for a promised inheritance. Needless to say, things don't go as planned. Towles talked to NPR's Scott Simon about the book — and also about the way the world moves so much faster now than it did in the 1950s, and how that affects the stories kids hear and see and create.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaung. One time I was driving and flipping through the car radio, and I stumbled across this guy, just reading the TV schedule for the week. I think it must have been for a nearby assisted living facility or something, but it was the most interesting and gripping radio I'd heard
0:22.3	in a while. No shots to my employer. I'm not even sure why it was so compelling. I think it was the
0:28.6	combination of intimacy and mundanity. And that's a road trip, right? I thought about it again after
0:35.3	I heard Amor Tolls talking about his new book,
0:43.4	Lincoln Highway. We all have had the experience that when we are driving, when we're in a journey of any kind, what we're paying attention to shifts dramatically from our normal daily
0:48.4	life, right? We automatically see the world a little bit differently.
0:52.0	The novel is about four kids on a road trip, which doesn't go as planned, and he talked
0:57.5	with NPR Scott Simon about it.
0:59.3	This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe.
1:03.6	When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no
1:08.7	hidden fees.
1:09.6	Join millions of customers and visit wise.com.
1:13.1	T's and C's apply.
1:14.8	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
1:19.6	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.
1:24.1	On our new show, sources and methods, NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of
1:28.6	real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and
1:34.8	methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Kirkus Reviews calls Amor Toll's new novel
1:42.4	The Lincoln Highway, a remarkable blend of sweetness and doom.
1:48.1	The author of the best-selling and highly acclaimed a gentleman in Moscow has written a road story that diverges along two different roads
1:55.9	in between a bright red studibaker and a freight train set in the early 1950s landscape of America's highways, railways, and dreams.
2:06.7	Amor Tolls joins us now. Thank you so much for being with us.
	...

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