Carnovsky's Retreat

A midsummer morning, Brooklyn, 1955. Oscar Carnovsky, a respectable (yet hardly distinguished) middle-aged man, leaves for work in the usual fashion: takes his share of the morning paper, kisses his wife goodbye, and waves back as he turns the corner of Linden Boulevard. He has done it precisely this way five thousand times.

This particular morning, however, he waves from the corner and is not seen again, nor is he heard from, for years. Decades later (at Oscar’s funeral) his daybooks come to light—a record of the missing years and of his life as The Invisible Mensch.

This unremarkable man will soon become an unforgettable character as you accompany him on his flight through the 1950s in a highly original second novel from Larry Duberstein, whose earlier work, The Marriage Hearse, was hailed by the critics.