The Broken King

‘Michael Thomas has written a truly extraordinary memoir, one that sears and sings with such terrible, beautiful honesty it will burn its way deep into your bones. The Broken King is a triumph, and reading it will leave you changed. It’s genuinely one of the most extraordinary and magical books I have ever read. I’m full of awe.’ Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk

‘Entirely mesmerizing… With a virtuosic command of language and an eagle eye for punishing detail, Thomas has rendered beautifully an excruciating existence from which it is impossible to turn away’ New York Times

From the author of Man Gone Down – winner of the 2007 Dublin International Literary Award – comes a deeply personal memoir of race, trauma, alcoholism, parenting, mental illness and ultimately hope in a portrait of three generations of Black American men.

In his second book and first work of nonfiction, The Broken King, Thomas explores fathers and sons, lovers and the beloved, trauma and recovery, success and failure in a unique, urgent, and timeless memoir.

Bringing to mind both James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Thomas’ memoir unfolds through six powerful, interlocking and overlaying parts focusing on the lives of five men: his father—a philosopher, Boston Red Sox fan, and absent parent; his estranged older brother; his two sons growing up in Brooklyn; and always, heartbreakingly himself. At the centre of The Broken King is the story of Thomas’ own breakdown, a result of inherited family history and his own experiences, from growing up Black in the Boston suburbs to publishing a prize-winning novel with “the house of Beckett.”

Every page of The Broken King rings with the impact of America’s sweeping struggle with race and class, education and family, and builds to a brave, meticulous articulation of a creative mind’s journey into and out of madness.