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    The Last Good Chance: A Novel
    The Last Good Chance: A Novel
    The Last Good Chance: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Last Good Chance: A Novel

    Written by Tom Barbash

    Narrated by Charlie Thurston

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    In this captivating first novel, a young man’s plan to revitalize his hometown leads four of its inhabitants down alternating paths of desire and deceit.

    When the charismatic Jack Lambeau returns to his hometown along Lake Ontario with an eye toward revitalizing its fading post-industrial waterfront into a tasteful commercial development for tourists and yuppies, the town of Lakeland quickly gets on board. At first glance, Jack seems to have it all: a successful urban planner, he’s also brought home his fiancée, Anne, a talented artist with whom he’s fiercely in love. But it doesn’t take long for cracks to appear in Jack’s idyllic life

    Enter Steven Turner – exiled New Yorker, local reporter looking for a scoop, and Jack’s best friend in Lakeland. Between the two of them come Anne, who Steven grows close to, and Jack’s floundering brother Harris, who spends his nights breaking the law to bury the mistakes of the past that might derail Jack’s plans. As Steven’s personal and professional incursion into Jack’s life intensifies, all four characters find themselves starting to unravel.

    Moving, poignant, and rife with humor, The Last Good Chance is a powerful debut novel about the moral compromises we make in the name of loyalty, ambition, and love.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateDec 4, 2018
    ISBN9780062909688
    Author

    Tom Barbash

    Tom Barbash is the author of the award-winning novel The Last Good Chance and the New York Times non-fiction bestseller, On Top of the World. His stories and articles have been published in Tin House, McSweeney's, VQR and other publications, and have been performed on US National Public Radio. Raised in Manhattan, he currently lives in California.

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    Reviews for The Last Good Chance

    3.5/5

    10 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I have a personal interest in the locale which is the setting for this book: upstate New York. My daughter has just moved there with the hope that it will be a positive turning point in her life. That's also what this story is all about - people moving into upstate New York and hoping that despite the harsh environment with the evident decay and apparent decline of the region, they can somehow turn things around. I reckon Barbash has done an outstanding job of telling a story that reflects this tension. It's a story which is as much about relationships and their potential for development as is is about the urban (re-)development of the town and its community. The issue of loyalty has been mentioned by reviewers as a prominent theme, and I also found the treatment of this to be a great strength of the novel. But honesty and truth are there too, against which the value of loyalty is juxtaposed. At the end of the book it isn't completely clear what the future holds for all the players. I'll have to wait a few years to find out how my daughter's life is impacted by her experience of upstate New York.
    • 2/5
      Too slow, couldn’t stand the wife, kept waiting for something to happen.
    • 4/5
      The story is told from the viewpoint of 3 main characters (though always in third person): a local boy made good who returns from NYC to his dying upstate New York hometown to oversee a project on the Lake Ontario harborfront to revitalize the town; his fiance, who gives up her advertising job to join him & pursue her painting career; & the local reporter who threatens their relationship & the town's project. It's a well-told story, with lots of good dialog writing, about loyalty to friends, spouse, & place; about how other values more valued in our culture, such as independence & career advancement, undermine such loyalties; & about how misplaced loyalties--or a willingness to pursue them through inappropriate means--are an even greater threat to genuine loyalty. Both sophisticated in theme & down to earth in setting & narration.