Meet John Trow: A Novel - Couverture rigide

Steven Armour is a man at a crossroad: his rise up the career ladder has slowed to a crawl, and his family is slipping out of control. But life takes a dramatic turn for Steven when, on a whim, he joins a local group of Civil War re-enactors.

Assigned to immerse himself in the life of Private John Trow, Steven soon finds that the complex drills of the Union army seem to come to him naturally and his growing infatuation with Polly Kellogg, the wife of the regiment's captain, fires a passion that had cooled with his own wife. While the world around him races faster and faster toward the millennium, Steven turns to the simple consolations of nineteenth-century life.

But so thoroughly does Steven embrace the life of John Trow that even Steven begins to wonder if he is just playing a part, or whether the unquiet spirit of John Trow is taking him over. As Steven's identity slips through his fingers, he must ask himself what - and who - he is willing to sacrifice to become the man he believes he should have been.

Meet John Trow is a moving love story and a haunting, darkly comic exploration of the links between past and present.

"Dyja pulls the past straight into the present with this novel, which manages to be both hilarious and disturbing" (Erica Wagner The Times)

"Thomas Dyja spins a fascinating tale of a man who tries to solve his problems in the present by immersing himself in the past, with eerie and almost heartbreaking success" (Margot Livesey)

"Dyja has created a modern achetype in Steven Armour, a man in desperate need of some authenticity in his life who, in the end, gets more authenticity than he bargained for" (Jonathan Dee)

"Wondrous, wry and moving... the novel is a joy... as surprising as it is poignant" (Washington Post)