It is 1967, and as America’s allies hesitate over whether to send more troops to Vietnam and the strains of ‘All You Need is Love’ echo from Abbey Road, students take to the streets of Wellington, New Zealand, to protest the war. Among them are Race, Candy, Chadwick and FitzGerald and their elusive, electrifying friend Morgan Tawhai. They are young and hopeful and the world is all before them.
Forty years later, in Washington DC, Race’s son Toby is navigating his own path across a landscape still trembling with the reverberations of 9/11. Uncertain whether love is really all he needs, Toby, along with his girlfriend JoJo, watches the centuries-old fragments of a comet fall across the sky while America secretly begins planning to invade Iraq.
As Race and his companions move through the first decade of the new millennium, their friendships tested and pulled apart and reconfigured anew, they come to discover that Morgan – who burned as brightly as any comet, who could quote Shakespeare and Sterne, The Iliad and Bob Dylan, and who will forever remain the twenty-year-old they once knew – is both the mystery and the touchstone of their lives.
From the shores of New Zealand to the political heart of Washington and to the hills above Beirut, Some Here Among Us is a stunning meditation on youth and promise and loss. It is a novel for our times.
