The rich and nuanced story of a moment of fear and abandonment that reverberates across decades and changes the course of many lives, by beloved PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Joan Silber
In the gritty East Village of 1970s New York, Ivan and his best friend, Eddie, a popular local bartender, are dabbling in drugs following a short tour of Europe. One night, as Ivan experiments with heroin with Eddie, things go horribly wrong. Ivan rushes Eddie to a crowded local ER and, believing his friend is about to die, leaves him there.
This one act of abandonment haunts Ivan his entire life. He keeps this secret from his friends and later his family, forever searching for mercy from "the remorse that never dies." Ivan's decision also ripples across time through an extended community, affecting a host of other people unknowingly connected to that night.
Following a bold cast of characters across decades, and set against the changing social and sexual mores from the 1970s onward, Mercy is Silber's most ambitious and expansive novel yet, proving once again how we are all connected in mysterious and often unknown ways. JOAN SILBER is the author of ten books of fiction. Her last book, Secrets of Happiness, was a Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year and an O Magazine Most Anticipated Book. Her novel, Improvement, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She also received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Her book, Fools, was long-listed for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Other works include The Size of the World, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and Ideas of Heaven, finalist for the National Book Award and The Story Prize. She lives in New York and has taught at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson MFA program.
