The Duke of Buccleuch

Coming on the ONE HUNDRED YEAR ANNIVERSARY of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY, a continuation story that pays tribute to the celebrated author and his most enduring work.

Picking up immediately in the fall of 1922, THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH chronicles the period from when Nick Carraway returns to his childhood home in Saint Paul, to when he finally writes THE GREAT GATSBY, some two years later. We follow Nick as he reluctantly takes his place in his family's wholesale hardware business and rekindles a relationship with the girl he thought he had left behind for good when he went to New York to take up the bond business. Woven through the narrative of Nick's attempts to reassert his independence from his family are the circumstances that ultimately compel Nick to put pen to paper in order to tell Gatsby's story.

Thoroughly researched, many elements from Fitzgerald's life are borrowed for the narrative, while those literary influences that are said to have inspired Fitzgerald when writing THE GREAT GATSBY are accounted for. And sure to delight the countless devotees of the original work, many of Fitzgerald's beloved and now iconic characters make an appearance, alongside a whole new cast.

Fall/Winter of 1922. Nick Carraway has just come home to Minnesota after failing to make it as a bond salesman in New York. Returned a changed man, disillusioned by his time East, and haunted by the murder of Jay Gatsby, a notorious bootlegger and underworld criminal who had been his neighbor and friend, Nick struggles to assimilate back into the staid, Middle Western life he thought he'd left behind for good.

Bowing to the expectations of family and friends, Nick ends up back in the family hardware business and finds himself in a rekindled relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Anne. His entire future being decided for him, with him having little input in the matter, Nick bristles at his prospects.

And though he'd done his best to put Gatsby behind him, when Nick returns to New York on family business, he finds that though Jay Gatsby may be dead and gone, the repercussions from his death continue to live on, and Nick's unresolved feelings come to the fore.

Meanwhile, Nick's turn to writing creatively as an outlet unexpectedly bears fruit when his short stories find their way into print. His long-sought desire for financial independence apart from his family achieved, Nick is faced with some difficult choices. And when certain revelations regarding Jay Gatsby come to light, Nick's need to set the record straight on behalf of his former friend outweighs his ongoing ambivalence toward the man-making Jay Gatsby the unlikely subject of Nick's highly anticipated first novel.