The Drift

He was Charles Harmon, a black man %u201Cliving white%u201D and living well%u2014beautiful wife, German car, big house%u2014in an upper-upper-middle-class suburb of Los Angeles. He is Brain Nigger Charlie, a train tramp eking out a ragged existence on the railroads, leaning on drugs to keep him from thinking about everything he had, everything his creeping dementia has forced him to run from. Charlie%u2019s been asked a desperate favor: find the seventeen-year-old niece of the man who taught him how to survive the rails%u2014a girl lost somewhere on the High Line, the %u201Ccorridors of racist hate%u201D along the tracks of the Pacific Northwest. Charlie has little hope of finding her alive, but the request is an obligation he can%u2019t refuse. The search is a twisted trail that leads from Iowa to Washington State, mixing lies and deceit, hate and hopelessness, and brutal, stubbornly unsolved murders. All of which Charlie is prepared to meet in kind. What he isn%u2019t prepared for is a path that will eventually lead him back to what he thought no longer existed%u2014his own humanity%u2014though the toll may turn out to be his life. At once stunningly visceral and psychologically complex, furiously paced and deeply empathic, The Drift is John Ridley%u2019s most ambitious, most galvanizing novel yet. From the Hardcover edition. Mylar protector included. Please note the image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item.…