Host Ken Jones talks with Thomas Kohnstamm, author of the new novel Lake City, from Counterpoint Press.
Lake City tells the story of Lane Bueche, a 27 year-old reluctant adult, born and raised in the Northeast Seattle neighborhood Lake City, a place untouched by the growth and prosperity of the surrounding area.
The time is the holiday season of 2001, just after 9/11. Lane is back living in his mother’s house, after getting dumped by his wife in Manhattan. Lane is in danger of losing not just a wife, but, mostly due to her family’s wealth, perhaps his only chance to escape the poverty and hopelessness of his home turf. He’s struggling to raise enough money to return to New York, and work things out with his wife, when he meets a rich realtor who offers him a way out, though one of questionable ethics and morality.
In the words of Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See, “Lake City is a darkly funny and extremely relevant debut novel about American inequality and moral authority… The book ultimately becomes an elegy for a now-gone Seattle, and a lesson in how the place we’re from never fully lets us go.”
- KBOO