Schroder - Amity Gaige

Written by Amity Gaige
Read by Will Collyer
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

A lyrical and deeply affecting novel recounting the seven days a father spends on the road with his daughter after kidnapping her during a parental visit. Attending a New England summer camp, young Eric Schroder - a first-generation East German immigrant - adopts the last name Kennedy to more easily fit in, a fateful white lie that will set him on an improbable and ultimately tragic course.

Schroder relates the story of Eric’s urgent escape years later to Lake Champlain, Vermont, with his 6-year-old daughter, Meadow, in an attempt to outrun the authorities amid a heated custody battle with his wife, who will soon discover that her husband is not who he says he is. From a correctional facility, Eric surveys the course of his life to understand - and maybe even explain - his behavior: the painful separation from his mother in childhood; a harrowing escape to America with his taciturn father; a romance that withered under a shadow of lies; and his proudest moments and greatest regrets as a flawed but loving father.

Alternately lovesick and ecstatic, Amity Gaige’s deftly imagined novel offers a profound meditation on history and fatherhood, and the many identities we take on in our lives - those we are born with and those we construct for ourselves.

February 5 2013
7 hrs and 10 mins

(This novel takes inspiration from Christian Gerhartsreiter, whose case is detailed in the non-fiction book The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, by Mark Seal.)