Literary Fiction · DarkA drifter returns to Albany over three days at Halloween
Ironweed
A homeless man comes back to his hometown and meets the dead
Francis Phelan, a drifter, returns to Albany, New York, in the Great Depression after twenty-two years away. He had left his family after accidentally killing his infant son. The novel covers three days, Halloween, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, during which he encounters dead people from his past.
More about this book
Who
Francis Phelan, a drifter who returns to Albany after twenty-two years.
World
Albany, New York, during the Great Depression, over the three days from Halloween to All Souls' Day.
What makes it different
Its structure resembles Dante's Divine Comedy, and its epigraph is from the Purgatorio. It is the third book in Kennedy's Albany cycle, after Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. It won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was made into a 1987 film with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.
Feel
Bleak but humane, a short and haunted book.
Page count and cover shown for: Selected edition
Further reading
- IronweedWikipedia