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Nick Dybek is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was chosen as a Granta New Voice. He is the recipient of a Hopwood Award for Short Fiction, a Maytag Fellowship and a 2010 Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man is his first novel. He lives in New York.
Author photo © Melissa Blackall
August 2013 Debut of the Month. An atmospheric and engrossing coming of age thriller. A death on Loyalty Island, in Northern Washington State, leads 14 year old Cal to be swept up in a storm of lies and deceit that make him question his family and the limits of his own morality. This modern re-telling of Treasure Island is an gripping and suspenseful debut. In addition to our Lovereading expert opinion for When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man, a small number of Lovereading members were lucky enough to be invited to review this title - 'Cleverly complex and deeply fascinating...Nick Dybek’s novel is truly beautiful and affecting' - Lucinda Fountain. Scroll down to read more reviews.
Loyalty Island is a small fishing community dependent on the Gaunt family fleet for survival. Each winter, Cal's father - a captain of the fleet - sets sail for Alaska to trawl for crab. Cal may be too young to join in their adventure, but he is old enough to know that everything depends on the fate of those few boats thousands of miles north. When the fleet's owner, John Gaunt, dies, he leaves the town's livelihood in peril. With winter fast approaching, Cal starts to suspect that his father may have taken extreme measures to save the fleet from extinction...Plagued by doubt, his loyalties strained and his moral compass in tatters, Cal is forced to make a terrible choice.
'The Verdun Affair is ravishingly beautiful, and as much about love as about war . . . Dybek is a storyteller of great power. If there's any justice, this novel will be widely read and recognized. I absolutely adored it' Paula McLain, bestselling author of THE PARIS WIFE and CIRCLING THE SUN A sweeping, romantic, and profoundly moving novel, set in Europe in the aftermath of World War I and Los Angeles in the 1950s, about a lonely young man, a beautiful widow, and the amnesiac soldier whose puzzling case binds them together even as it tears them apart. In 1920, two young Americans meet in Verdun, the city in France where one of the most devastating battles of the war was waged. Tom is an orphan from Chicago, a former ambulance driver now gathering bones from the battlefield; Sarah is an expatriate from Boston searching for the husband who wandered off from his division and hasn't been seen since. Quickly, the two fall into a complicated affair against the ghostly backdrop of the ruined city. Months later, Sarah and Tom meet again at the psychiatric ward of an Italian hospital, drawn there by the appearance of a mysterious patient the doctors call Douglas Fairbanks (after the silent film actor) - a shell-shocked soldier with no memory of who he is. At the hospital, Tom and Sarah are joined by Paul, an Austrian journalist with his own interest in the amnesiac. Each is keeping a secret; each has been shaken by the horrors of war. Decades later, Tom, now a successful screenwriter, encounters Paul by chance in LA, still grappling with the questions raised by this gorgeous and incisive novel: How to begin again after unfathomable trauma? How to love after so much loss? And who, in the end, was Douglas Fairbanks? From the bone-strewn fields of Verdun to the bombed-out cafes of Paris, from the riot-torn streets of Bologna to the riotous parties of 1950s Hollywood, The Verdun Affair is a riveting tale of romance, grief and the far-reaching consequences of a single lie.
A sweeping, romantic, and profoundly moving novel, set in Europe in the aftermath of World War I and Los Angeles in the 1950s, about a lonely young man, a beautiful widow, and the amnesiac soldier whose puzzling case binds them together even as it tears them apart. In 1920, two young Americans meet in Verdun, the city in France where one of the most devastating battles of the war was waged. Tom is an orphan from Chicago, a former ambulance driver now gathering bones from the battlefield; Sarah is an expatriate from Boston searching for the husband who wandered off from his division and hasn't been seen since. Quickly, the two fall into a complicated affair against the ghostly backdrop of the ruined city. Months later, Sarah and Tom meet again at the psychiatric ward of an Italian hospital, drawn there by the appearance of a mysterious patient the doctors call Douglas Fairbanks (after the silent film actor) - a shell-shocked soldier with no memory of who he is. At the hospital, Tom and Sarah are joined by Paul, an Austrian journalist with his own interest in the amnesiac. Each is keeping a secret; each has been shaken by the horrors of war. Decades later, Tom, now a successful screenwriter, encounters Paul by chance in LA, still grappling with the questions raised by this gorgeous and incisive novel: How to begin again after unfathomable trauma? How to love after so much loss? And who, in the end, was Douglas Fairbanks? From the bone-strewn fields of Verdun to the bombed-out cafes of Paris, from the riot-torn streets of Bologna to the riotous parties of 1950s Hollywood, The Verdun Affair is a riveting tale of romance, grief and the far-reaching consequences of a single lie.
August 2013 Debut of the Month. An atmospheric and engrossing coming of age thriller. A death on Loyalty Island, in Northern Washington State, leads 14 year old Cal to be swept up in a storm of lies and deceit that make him question his family and the limits of his own morality. This modern re-telling of Treasure Island is an gripping and suspenseful debut. In addition to our Lovereading expert opinion for When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man, a small number of Lovereading members were lucky enough to be invited to review this title - 'Cleverly complex and deeply fascinating...Nick Dybek’s novel is truly beautiful and affecting' - Lucinda Fountain. Scroll down to read more reviews.