Praise for The Ice Harp

Shelf Unbound "Reading List" selection
Foreword Reviews "Book of the Day" selection

"What troubled Emerson still troubles us today, as Norman Lock makes clear. . . . A harrowing novel." -New York Sun

"Lock's latest in his luminous American Novels series . . . provides countless memorable turns of phrase, and it is the rare paragraph that does not inspire underlining as Lock explores memory, mortality, and the passage of time." --Booklist (starred review)

"An elegiac, powerful book about a thinker's limitations." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A fascinating and haunting novel, The Ice Harp chronicles the vulnerable mortality of an American genius." --Foreword Reviews

"Reveal[s] a man still deeply troubled by serious questions and regrets about his life's work, particularly his lack of meaningful action in the matters of slavery and civil rights. . . . Emerson probably would have loved the novel." --Historical Novels Review

"As intellectually entertaining as it is memorably thought provoking." --Midwest Book Review

"In The Ice Harp, Norman Lock deftly takes us into the polyphonic swirl of Emerson's mind at the end of his life, inviting us to meet the man anew even as the philosopher fights to stop forgetting himself. Who will I be when the words are gone, the great thinker wonders, and how will I know what is right? I gladly asked myself these same impossible questions on every page of this remarkably empathetic and deeply moral novel." --Matt Bell, author of Appleseed and Refuse to Be Done

"Here is Emerson unleashed--caustic, brilliant, befuddled, wrangling with the living and the dead. Delights of language and character shine on every page of The Ice Harp as Emerson confronts his own humanity." --Victoria Redel, author of Before Everything and Paradise

Select Praise for Norman Lock's The American Novels Series

"Norman Lock has created a memorable portrait gallery of American subjects, in a succession of audaciously imagined, wonderfully original, and beautifully written novels unlike anything in our literature." --Joyce Carol Oates

"Shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights." --NPR

"Our national history and literature are Norman Lock's playground in his dazzling series, The American Novels. . . . [His] supple, elegantly plain-spoken prose captures the generosity of the American spirit in addition to its moral failures, and his passionate engagement with our literary heritage evinces pride in its unique character." --Washington Post

"This is fiction of a high caliber. . . on the cutting edge of history, providing us with a way to grapple with our evolving sense of the past, as we wonder what is next." --New York Sun

On The Boy in His Winter

"[Lock] is one of the most interesting writers out there. This time, he re-imagines Huck Finn's journeys, transporting the iconic character deep into America's past--and future." --Reader's Digest

On American Meteor

"[Walt Whitman] hovers over [American Meteor], just as Mark Twain's spirit pervaded The Boy in His Winter. . . . Like all Mr. Lock's books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield." --Wall Street Journal

On The