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The Last Green Light : Guernica World Editions - George Foy

The Last Green Light

By: George Foy

Paperback | 1 May 2024

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The Great Gatsby is known for the glitz and glamour of Gilded Age plutocrats; in The Last Green Light, the working people of Fitzgerald''s novel get to tell their own, beautifully textured tale. Meet Jon Laine, a Midwesterner who captains one of the rumrunning boats that are the source of Gatsby''s great wealth; enter a colorful netherworld of diner cooks, dump scavengers, secretaries, deckhands and car mechanics caught in the increasingly deadly conflict between organized crime syndicates, amid the murderous passions of caste-busting love. From movie stars to dark freighters, Wobblies to Harlem nightclubs The Last Green Light, like a jazz improvisation, riffs on a great American novel, creating its own, unique world in the process.

Industry Reviews

[Foy is] a storyteller who, like Conrad, can compress into a tale you can't put down all the complexities of a time and place.

--Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature

America's love affair with gangsters didn't start with The Great Gatsby and doesn't look like it's ending soon. Fitzgerald's novel and the party-throwing icon at its centre are set like a dazzling jewel on the forehead of Modern Fiction. But that is only one side of paradise, and in The Last Green Light, George Foy takes us on a thrilling, beautifully written ride through another, darker side. How did Gatsby come into all that money? Foy answers that question with a realistic expos? of Gatsby's past and the rum-running mayhem exploding off the shores of Jazz Age Long Island ... Readers will recognize names from Fitzgerald's book, but this novel stands on its own. Foy deploys a cast of vividly imagined characters into scenes of slash-bang action intertwined with a deeply humane evocation of longing--for love, status, and ultimately self-respect.

--Giles Blunt, author of the Cardinal series (novels and TV)

If The Great Gatsby had a subconscious it would be this lovely, often poetic novel, in which working people pull the mask off "Gilded Age" New York City to reveal the violence and exploitation underlying the 1920s American dream. A must-read.

--Thomas H. Cook, Edgar-winning author of Red Leaves and The Chatham School Affair

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