Amor Towles's third novel follows Emmett Watson, an eighteen-year-old just released from a juvenile work farm in Kansas, who plans to collect his eight-year-old brother Billy and drive to California to start fresh. Their father has died, the farm has been foreclosed, and nothing holds them in Nebraska. But two friends from the work farm have hidden in the trunk of the warden's car and have different plans. Duchess and Woolly want to go to New York, and before Emmett realizes what has happened, his journey west becomes a journey east. The novel spans just ten days in June 1954, with each chapter narrated by a different character, including the two brothers, their uninvited companions, and several people they encounter along the way. Towles crafts an intricate plot full of coincidences, near-misses, and unexpected connections, while exploring themes of class, fate, and the American Dream. The novel draws on the picaresque tradition, with its young protagonists encountering a cross-section of 1950s America, while also examining how the past constrains the futures available to different characters. Billy, a precocious reader obsessed with adventure stories and maps, provides an innocent perspective that highlights the moral complexity of the adult world. Readers will find here the elegant prose and careful plotting of Towles's earlier novels applied to a new American landscape.