Old Crow

Set in the shadowed parlors of post-WWI Boston, Alice Brown's novel traces the fractured interior life of John Raven, a man whose war has left him hollowed out and unable to inhabit the role his family demands of him. As he waits in his library for his nephew Dick to arrive, Raven is locked in silent combat with his own desire to simply disappear, to slip free from the weight of expectations he can no longer bear. When Nan enters their orbit, the three become tangled in a delicate dance of longing, loyalty, and the unspoken bargains families make with one another. The conversations are deceptively quiet, but beneath them runs a current of desperate reckoning with love, responsibility, and what we owe the dead versions of ourselves. This is a novel about the particular loneliness of surviving something that others cannot see, and the way intimate relationships become battlegrounds for unresolved grief.