The Briary Bush: A Novel

Felix Fay sits at his desk in a small-town newspaper office, staring at the Chicago skyline he can almost see from here, and knows he must leave. A heartbreak has shattered whatever fragile life he'd built in Port Royal, and now nothing remains but the burning conviction that he must become someone else entirely. The city calls to him: a vast, mechanical heart promising reinvention to any young man willing to shed his old skin. But can he really escape who he is? Floyd Dell, writing in the flush of the Chicago Renaissance, crafts a portrait of the American ambition itself, the way the city promises transformation while quietly demanding you surrender the very parts of yourself that might matter. This is a novel about the ache of wanting to be reborn, and the terror that the self you're fleeing might be the only one worth keeping. For readers who thrill to early modernist explorations of identity, of how we construct and demolish ourselves in pursuit of some better version.