Saint Nick

Following the events of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway leaves New York and returns to his hometown of Saint Paul, disillusioned by his time in the East and haunted by the memory of Jay Gatsby. What he witnessed there-its wealth, its evasions, its violence-refuses to settle into meaning. What remains is not memory, but pressure: the sense that what happened demands an account he is not yet able to give.

At home, amid family obligation and unfinished loyalties, Nick begins a reckoning with the moral weight of what he has seen-and with the life he must now choose to live. A return to New York and a final visit to Daisy Buchanan's home in Lake Forest force him to confront the distance between events as they were lived and the version already forming in his mind.

Set between 1922 and 1924, Saint Nick traces Nick Carraway's gradual recognition of his complicity in that fateful summer-not as a neutral observer, but as a confidant, and finally, an accomplice. When a final truth comes to light, he must decide what the story will be-and what it will conceal.

Saint Nick is a novel about the man behind the book about Gatsby-and the events that determined how it would be told. This edition includes an Author's Note and a discussion guide.