The Friends of Freeland
In this roomy, bawdy, exuberantly comic novel, Brad Leithauser takes us to an imaginary island-country, Freeland, during a crucial election year.
Freeland occupies its own place in the North Atlantic, somewhere between Iceland and Greenland. A geological miracle, it is desolate ("What green is to Ireland, gray is to Freeland") -- and inspiring.
The "friends" of the title are Hannibal, an expansive, lovable, unruly giant of a man who has been President of Freeland for twenty years, and Eggert, his shrewd, often prickly, always devious sidekick and adviser, who is Poet Laureate of Freeland and the book's narrator.
As the book opens, Freeland -- long happily isolated and stubbornly independent -- is in trouble. The sins of the rest of the world have…
$22.95
September 8, 1998BRAD LEITHAUSER is the author, most recently, of Rhyme’s Rooms and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship. This is his nineteenth book. He is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and divides his time between Baltimore, MD, and Amherst, MA.