> Skip to content
[]
  • Published: 15 March 2003
  • ISBN: 9780099449676
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $24.99

Meet John Trow



'Chucking it all in - all the pointless anxiety, all the buzzing lite crap with which we surround ourselves - is an urge everyone feels, or ought to. In Meet John Trow, Thomas Dyja uses that impulse to drive a novel that's part satire, part domestic drama, part post-modern ghost story. And the whole thing works like a dream' - Kurt Andersen

Steven Armour is a man at a crossroad: his rise up the career ladder has slowed to a crawl, and his family is slipping out of control. But life takes a dramatic turn for Steven when, on a whim, he joins a local group of Civil War re-enactors.

Assigned to immerse himself in the life of Private John Trow, Steven soon finds that the complex drills of the Union army seem to come to him naturally and his growing infatuation with Polly Kellogg, the wife of the regiment's captain, fires a passion that had cooled with his own wife. While the world around him races faster and faster toward the millennium, Steven turns to the simple consolations of nineteenth-century life.

But so thoroughly does Steven embrace the life of John Trow that even Steven begins to wonder if he is just playing a part, or whether the unquiet spirit of John Trow is taking him over. As Steven's identity slips through his fingers, he must ask himself what - and who - he is willing to sacrifice to become the man he believes he should have been.

Meet John Trow is a moving love story and a haunting, darkly comic exploration of the links between past and present.

  • Published: 15 March 2003
  • ISBN: 9780099449676
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Thomas Dyja

Thomas Dyja lives in New York City with his wife and two children. He has written three novels, Meet John Trow, Play For a Kingdom and The Moon in Our Hands, as well as a biography of the civil rights pioneer, Walter White.

Praise for Meet John Trow

Dyja pulls the past straight into the present with this novel, which manages to be both hilarious and disturbing

Erica Wagner, The Times

Thomas Dyja spins a fascinating tale of a man who tries to solve his problems in the present by immersing himself in the past, with eerie and almost heartbreaking success

Margot Livesey

Dyja has created a modern achetype in Steven Armour, a man in desperate need of some authenticity in his life who, in the end, gets more authenticity than he bargained for

Jonathan Dee

Wondrous, wry and moving... the novel is a joy... as surprising as it is poignant

Washington Post