Long Time Gone: A Novel

It was 1969 on Hippie Hill in Brooklyn, and it seemed as if the world were coming to an end. LONG TIMEGONE 1969: Woodstock and the Moratorium, a man on the moon, Broadway Joe Namath, the Mets take the World Series. It was a year that saw goof balls, acid, thorazine, pot, Seconal, amphetamines, meth, and THC. It was the year the sixties ended, and it was the year in which Danny Cassidy saw his life shattered in a purple haze of drugs and violence. Did he kill the father of the girl of his teenage dreams? Or was he framed to cover up a far darker crime? Thirty-two years later, Danny, now a forty-nine-year-old divorced journalist, returns to his old neighborhood for his father's wake and one last attempt to exorcise the demons of that watershed year. One final chance as well to piece together the lost love of his life: Erika Malone, now a successful businesswoman whose father's unsolved murder remains the missing piece of the puzzle of both their lives. Denis Hamill's Fork in the Road was lauded by The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, Library Journal, The Irish Voice, and Publishers Weekly, which called it a "lively, sad, humorous tale." Frank McCourt said, "When you read Fork in the Road, make sure your chair is comfortable, because Denis Hamill hooks you and keeps you to the end." Now, in Long Time Gone, Denis Hamill evokes a lost New York and a dashed love affair, both dissolved into the jinglejangle mornings that came following.