Journeyman | Granta

  • Published: 05/05/2016
  • ISBN: 9781783782529
  • Granta Books
  • 176 pages

Journeyman

Marc Bojanowski

Nolan Jackson is a journeyman carpenter by trade and an itinerant by nature. While fellow Americans fight in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he builds tract homes across the west of America, travelling between jobs. Following a shocking workplace accident in his temporary home of Las Vegas, he uproots himself from the relationships he has made to head west towards the ocean. On his way he passes through his brother’s town and is forced to stay put after an unexpected accident. Bereft of his car and his tools, with only the little-used and much-neglected mechanisms of his heart, Nolan turns to the task of building the foundations of a meaningful life.

Intimate, honest and exquisitely crafted, Journeyman is a state-of-the-nation novel about dwelling, building, belonging, love and the value of a place to call home.

There is so much to appreciate in this gripping and richly-textured story about searching for meaning in the 21st century American West. Every sentence is a pleasure, each scene is memorable, every conversation a gem. The landscape through which Nolan journeys is depicted with a keen precision, the characters and their predicaments are rendered with an unsentimental tenderness, and the themes this story explores are both timeless and very timely. Journeyman is a masterful novel

Jean Hegland, author, Into the Forest

Journeyman is a quiet novel with unexpected depths about morality and modern masculinity

Anne Goodwin, Annethology blog

This finding-yourself novel follows carpenter Nolan Jackson, who goes from building tract homes in the American West to building foundations of a meaningful life after he has an unexpected accident. Let yourself go and enjoy

Shortlist magazine

The Author

Marc Bojanowski graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and received his MFA in creative writing from the New School. His writing has appeared in The Literary Review and Granta. His first novel, The Dog Fighter, was published in 2004.

More about the author →

Marc Bojanowski on Granta.com

Fiction | Granta 132

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