Bret Lott

From the bestselling author of Jewel (an Oprah Book Club pick) and A Song I Knew By Heart comes a haunting novel about a family whose lives are shaded by a lost dream of Hollywood stardom. This multi-generational tale revolves around the mesmerizing business of dreams and the enormous impact those dreams ... (more)can have on the lives of ordinary people.

Please join us for an evening with Bret Lott -- bestselling
author of Jewel (an Oprah Book Club pick) and A Song
I Knew by Heart. Lott will read from and his haunting new novel, Ancient Highway, about a family whose lives are shaded by a lost dream of Hollywood
stardom.

In ... (more)1927, a fourteen-year-old
boy hops a boxcar in a dusty Texas town, headed for Hollywood, with
a dream of life in the movies, far away from the farmland that he thinks
holds nothing for him.

In 1947, a
ten-year-old girl has dreams of a real home, with a real family, in
a Texas town as far from the crowded streets of Los Angeles where her handsome cowboy father chases an impossible
dream of stardom and her mother holds a dark secret.

In 1980, a
young man returns home from the navy, not to the estranged mother he ran away from, but to his colorful
grandparents in Los Angeles, the ones who might have been a movie actor and a band singer.

In ANCIENT
HIGHWAY: A Novel Bret Lott weaves together stories from three
generations of a single family. Inspired by his own family, as was his
previous novel, Jewel, this meditation on home, familial ties, and the mesmerizing business
of dreams shows once again that Bret Lott is an accomplished portraitist
of the lives of ordinary people. I hope you will consider for
timely review coverage.

Bret Lott is
the author of the novels A Song I Knew by Heart, Jewel,
Reed’s Beach, A Stranger’s House, The Man Who Owned
Vermont, and The Hunt Club; the story collections How
to Get Home, A Dream of Old Leaves, and The Difference
Between Men and Women; and the memoirs Fathers, Sons, and Brothers,
and Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer’s Life. His writing has appeared in The Southern Review, The
Yale Review, The Iowa Review, Chicago Tribune, and
Story, and has been widely anthologized.
Editor of The Southern Review from 2004 to 2008, he lives
with his wife in Charleston, South Carolina.

Bret Lott returns to TBIB with Ancient Highway. Join us!

Lott picks up the themes that dominated his 1999 Oprah Book Club Selection, Jewel, in this multigenerational saga. In 1927, 14-year-old Earl Holmes runs away from his unhappy home in Hawkins, Tex., for Hollywood to become a movie star. But poor bumpkin Earl has better luck in marrying big band singer ... (more)Saralee Kennedy than he ever does building his acting résumé. Earl and Saralee's only child, Joan, grows up to resent her father's dogged pursuit of a practically nonexistent film career at the expense of his family's happiness. She has plenty of her own residual problems by the time she has her son, Brad, who joins the navy and returns in 1980 to live with his grandparents, Earl and Saralee, in L.A. Estranged from Joan, Brad takes it upon himself to heal the family's rifts. The colorful off-camera anecdotes of filmmaking are gems, particularly how Earl lands a bit role in a forgettable Three Stooges skit. (from Publishers Weekly)