American Rust is a great read for those interested in exploring complex relationships among friends and family. Philipp Meyer's writing is reminiscent of Steinbeck, evoking a sense of bleakness and despair while testing the limits of loyalty and love. The novel's unique feature is its ability to showcase the realities of living in a dying town, and the consequences of trying to escape it. Overall, American Rust is a masterpiece that will leave users contemplating the power of friendship and love.

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• New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award Nominee (2010)
• Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (2009)

Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation—as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love—that arise from its loss. From local bars to trainyards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.

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