&;A master American novelist.&; &;Vanity Fair   Ned Ayres has never wanted anything but a newspaper career. His defining moment comes early, when Ned is city editor of his hometown paper. One of his beat reporters fields a tip: William Grant, the town haberdasher, married to the bank president&;s daughter and the father of two children, once served six years in Joliet. The story runs&;Ned offers no resistance to his publisher&;s argument that the public has a right to know. The consequences, swift and shocking, haunt him throughout a long career until eventually, as the editor of a major newspaper in post-Kennedy-era Washington, DC, Ned has reason to return to the question of privacy and its many violations&;the gorgeously limned themes running through Ward Just&;s elegiac and masterly new novel.   &;A doggedly restrained character study that advances its themes obliquely through atmosphere and tone.  Often, the effect is quietly, even elegiacally beautiful, evoking the rhythms of Ernest Hemingway&;s early fiction . . . A quietly affecting, mournful achievement.&; &; Richmond Times-Dispatch &;In Just&;s hands, the ambiguous motives behind the paper&;s pursuit of the story are riveting . . . The novel stands on Just&;s memorable study of Ned. Your heart goes out to this kindly, complex man who&;s &;not truly interested in the things of his own life, preferring the lives of others.&;&; &; Seattle Times    Read Less