Boy from the North Country

A son returns home to his dying mother and discovers not only the shocking identity of the absent father he’d always wondered about, but a woman whose life he never truly understood

When 26-year-old Evan Klausner is suddenly called home to the secluded farmhouse where he was raised alone by his mother June, there is so much he does not yet know: the fact that his mother is dying; whether his biological father might really be Bob Dylan, whom Evan has revered since he was a teenager, and to whom Evan always has been told he bears an uncanny resemblance; the secrets of his mother’s life before he was born and what really drove her to this remote place, where he was brought up to believe in the healing, cathartic power of stories and, above all, of love.

In this heartbreaking jewelbox of a debut novel, Sam Sussman writes one of the most tender and devastating mother-son relationships of our era. Caring for his mother in real time, helplessly watching her fail even as she finally begins to tell him the truths he has waited so long to hear, Evan comes to understand what a gift this extraordinary woman has bequeathed him. 

Directly inspired by the author’s own uncertain celebrity paternity, Boy from the North Country is a bildungsroman of stellar proportions.