Jon Clinch

Part adventure, part romance, and part tall tale, Belzoni Dreams of Egypt is the “fictional autobiography” of Giovanni Battista Belzoni, a real-life 19th-century explorer, circus performer, and shameless self-promoter. He narrates the story at the end of his life, aboard a ship bound for the coast of Africa and his final, fatal adventure.

“The camp at Auschwitz took one year of my life, and of my own free will I gave it another four.” So begins The Thief of Auschwitz, in which Clinch steps for the first time beyond the deeply American roots of his earlier books to explore one of the darkest moments in mankind’s history—and to do so with the sympathy, vision, and heart that are the hallmarks of his work.

The edge of civilization is closer than we think. It’s as close as a primitive farm on the margins of an upstate New York town, where the three Proctor brothers live together in a kind of crumbling stasis. They linger like creatures from an older, wilder, and far less forgiving world—until one of them dies in his sleep and the other two are suspected of murder.

Jon Clinch takes us on a journey into the history and heart of one of American literature’s most brutal and mysterious figures: Huckleberry Finn’s father. The result is a deeply original tour de force that springs from Twain’s classic novel but takes on a fully realized life of its own. Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic.