Fall of Frost Book

In his most recent novel, I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, Brian Hall won acclaim for the way he used the intimate, revelatory voice of fiction to capture the half-hidden personal stories of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In his new novel, Hall turns to the life of Robert Frost, arguably America's most well-known poet. Frost, as both a man and an artist, was toughened by a hard life. His own father died when Frost was eleven; his only sibling, a sister, had to be institutionalized; and of his five children, one died before the age of four, one committed suicide, one went insane, and one died in childbirth.

Told in short chapters, each of which presents an emblematic incident with intensity and immediacy, Hall's novel deftly weaves together the earlier parts of Frost's life with his final year, 1962, when, at age eighty-eight and under the looming threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he made a visit to Russia and met with Nikita Khrushchev.

As Hall shows...

The Barnes & Noble Review

In a hotel room in Moscow in November 1962, Robert Frost waits to meet Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Frost has been invited to the USSR by Ambassador Dobrynin for this unlikely conversation, so here he is: old, deaf, and perhaps deluded, the famous poet hoping to persuade the infamous politician to loosen his grip on Berlin and retreat from a nuclear standoff with the U.S. over Cuba. Words, Frost believes, may save the world from imminent destruction. His words in particular. We know better, of course. Within three months the poet will be dead. Within a year President Kennedy will be killed. The planet will survive, thanks to words perhaps, but not those of any poet.