For Kings and Planets: A Novel

Ethan Canin is one of America’s finest writers. He has been called “brilliant” by the Los Angeles Times, “a tremendous talent” by the Chicago Sun-Times, and “dazzling” by Walker Percy. The bestselling author of The Palace Thief and Emperor of the Air now gives us this stunning new novel, For Kings and Planets.

“Years later, Orno Tarcher would think of his days in New York as a seduction. A seduction and a near miss, a time when his memory of the world around him –the shining stone stairwells, the taxicabs, the sea of nighttime lights–was glinting and of heroic proportion. Like a dream.” So begins this remarkable novel about the lives of two young men and the women they love.

Orno Tarcher arrives in New York City from a small town in Missouri, feeling unsophisticated and disadvantaged by his family’s bedrock values. He meets Marshall Emerson, the charismatic gem of a worldly family, a seductive and brilliant New Yorker who is revealed, as time passes, to be bent on destruction. The novel explores with depth and sophistication the conflicts of character at the heart of every life, the desire for grandeur and the lure of normalcy, the tension between rivalry and friendship, fathers and sons, love and betrayal. For Kings and Planets is the story of a man who thinks of himself as moral, who tests his character against power, deception, and seduction. It is also the story of a friendship fractured by love.

For Kings and Planets is a remarkable achievement, another fiction classic by the writer who has been called “a worthy successor to…Philip Roth, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Penn Warren.”