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9781965684474

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""An ... insightful novel about love and aging."" -Kirkus Reviews "" ... And in the end The Love You Take comes unexpectedly: things get complicated, confusing, are you thinking clearly, or has your brain been hijacked? Robert Wilson's energetic, funny, sad, extremely relatable book about transitioning into adulthood is played against the serious backdrop of Vietnam and its aftereffects. Remember friends? Their couches, so often helpfully available? Hearty Burgundy? Singing along with Mick Jagger on the car radio, when those songs first came out? Alas, our country's on a very different road trip now, but this novel is a reminder that we don't leave the past behind, or need to; eventually, lovingly, we focus on the way forward."" -Ann Beattie, author of The New Yorker Stories and Chilly Scenes of Winter ""The Love You Take is a novel of rare beauty. Wilson's clarity of expression gives us a perfectly transparent window into the lives of these characters and the times in which they lived. As I read, I kept being reminded of another great American realist, Richard Yates. I was entranced by this book."" -Steve Yarbrough, author of Stay Gone Days and The Unmade World ""The Love You Take is a memorable and provocative exploration of life's timeless moral dilemmas-political stands, personal ambitions, faithfulness in love-those compelling universal lessons that Robert Wilson has successfully pulled into a vivid time and place."" -Jill McCorkle, author, most recently, of Old Crimes: and Other Stories and Life After Life ""A front runner in this year's fiction list should be Robert Wilson's The Love You Take. Hard to believe it's a first novel, so convincing is the interior life and motivation of young Andy Watson and the pod of familiars who follow him through adventure and misadventure in 1970s America. The pleasures of Wilson's close observation keep pages turning. And, as Andy steers between the love of two beautiful women, toward shipwreck or safe harbor, the pages begin to turn themselves."" -John Rolfe Gardiner, author, most recently, of North of Ordinary: New Tales and Newport Rising ""This wise and witty-and often downright funny-chronicle of a young man's coming of age in the Seventies reminds us that while we may recall our lives according to where we were when catastrophe struck-Kent State, John Lennon's assassination-it is the people we knew, and the collisions we sustained with those people-some seismic, some silly, some both-that define us best. That is the news that stays news. No matter who you are, or where you are, or where and when you grew up, you'll recognize the people in this novel. You might even recognize yourself."" -Malcolm Jones, author of Little Boy Blues

Author Information

Robert Wilson is the author of biographies of three nineteenth-century Americans: P. T. Barnum, Mathew Brady, and Clarence King. He was the editor of The American Scholar from 2004 to 2022, and before that of the AARP Bulletin and Preservation magazine. He was also founding literary editor of Civilization, book editor and columnist for USA Today, and an editor at The Washington Post Book World. His essays, reviews, and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers. He lives in Manassas, Virginia.

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