Estranged

Overview

In 1950, at the intersection of public and private life, the city editor of a progressive newspaper grapples with political foes and personal loss

In this stylish and gripping historical noir novel, Randall Harker—the controversial city editor of an established progressive daily in the urban Midwest of 1950—excites the wrath of a reckless, corrupt, and ambitious U.S. senator anxious to make a name for himself as the country's most ardent anti-Communist. Decidedly flawed and afflicted by personal demons and political foes, Harker finds himself abandoned by friends and colleagues as he loses his wife, his reputation, and his job. He also finds himself losing the very sense of his own identity. With its gritty realism and dead-on period detail, the elegant prose of Estranged renders the rough-and-tumble world of mid-century journalism, the historical post-war battle between the Mob and trade unions, and the tender, intimate, and sensual moments of Harker's desperate romantic escape from the nightmare that his personal and professional life has become.

Reviews

"In Estranged, history comes alive. Charles Lamar Phillips' voice is immediate and urgent. This novel will suck you in and you'll want to spend time as much time as possible with the complicated and interesting world he's built." —Andrew Gifford, founder and director of the Santa Fe Writers Project  

"In sentences that capture the sensory specifics of late-1940s America, from 'rotten fruit and stale shoe polish' smell of printers' ink to the greased hair and cheap suit of its hack politician villain, Charles Lamar Phillips's novel re-creates a low and dishonest moment in our past that uncomfortably resembles the depths to which we have since fallen." —Michael Thurston, former fiction editor of Massachusetts Review, author of Houses from Another Street, and Provost and Dean of Faculty, Smith College

"From the first page of Estranged, Charles Lamar Phillips taps into the very best of the noir genre. And then he cranks it up to eleven." —Adam Kovac, author of The Surge

"This is one of those novels that perfectly recreates another place and time while also underscoring universal truths." —Jan English Leary, author of Thicker Than Blood and Skating on the Vertical

"Charlie Lamar Phillips is a smart, funny, open-eyed writer who salts his pages with discarded illusions. Tough and good: we could use more writers like him." —James Whorton, Jr., author of Angela Sloan, Frankland, and Approximately Heaven

"Estranged sprints along, drags you convincingly into the times, injects the ice of dread into your veins." —JL Crozier, author of What Empty Things Are These

"Edgy and richly cinematic, Estranged is noir storytelling at its finest. With its crooked politicians, galloping pace, sleek prose, and farm boy turned dogged city editor, this novel is exhilarating, proffering pitch-perfect slang, the heat of tough choices, and the rowdy fun of ordering Scotch at lunch." —Margot Douaihy, PhD, Editor, Northern New England Review 

Author Biography

Charles Lamar Phillips's fiction appears in Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Cincinnati Review, among others. His story collection Dead South appeared from Fomite in February 2020. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Phillips has been writer, columnist, or editor at Congressional Quarterly, The Washington Star, and Higher Educationand National Affairs. He is now managing editor of the American Journal of Play.