Mark Dunn: American Decameron

From the award-winning and highly acclaimed author of Ella Minnow Pea comes Mark Dunn s most ambitious novel to date. American Decameron tells one hundred stories, each taking place in a different year of the 20th century.

A girl in Galveston is born on the eve of a great storm and the dawn of the 20th century. Survivors of the Lusitania are accidentally reunited in the North Atlantic. A member of the Bonus Army find himself face to face with General MacArthur. A failed writer attempts to end his life on the Golden Gate Bridge until an unexpected heroine comes to his rescue, and on the doorstep of a new millennium, as the clock strikes twelve, the stage is set for a stunning denouement as the American century converges upon itself in a Greenwich nursing home, tying together all of the previous tales and the last one hundred years.

Zany and affecting, deeply moving and wildly hilarious, American Decameron is one America s most powerful voices at the top its game.