Adam the King

By Jeffrey Lewis

'Lewis catches the thrill of proximity to America's eastern WASP aristocracy to an uncomfortable degree: their studied vagueness, their heartiness, the aloofness that cannot be copied.' - Los Angeles Times

Adam the King forms a part of Jeffrey Lewis’s Meritocracy Quartet, a sequence of four books that span four decades of American history. Set in the money-mad ‘90s, Adam the King depicts the fallout from deepening class and social divisions in a voice that is ‘pitch-perfect… quirky, rueful and wise’ (Kirkus Reviews). The novel won the Independent Publishers Gold Medal for Literary Fiction in 2009, as well as the ForeWord Magazine Silver Award for Fiction in 2008. Lewis has received a string of other awards for his writing, including the Independent Publishers Award for General Fiction for his first novel in the Meritocracy Quartet, Meritocracy: A Love Story in 2004, and two Emmys and the Writer’s Guild Award for his work as a writer and producer on Hill Street Blues.

Jeffrey Lewis was born in New York, educated at Yale and now lives in Los Angeles and Castine, Maine. Adam the King is his fourth novel, following Meritocracy: A Love Story, The Conference of the Birds, and Theme Song for an Old Show.

'A marvelous ear for idiomatic speech reveal[ing]...the vagaries of love, the odd consorting of dignity and temptation and, yes, the fragility of creation and existence.' - Library Journal

‘Lewis is a master of the subtle interplay of coincidence and character, the light tripping of events that lead to a disaster that seems at once inevitable and yet shocking’ – The Washington Post