Saint Nick

What becomes of a witness once the life he has lived has not yet found its language?

In Saint Nick, A.S. Lorde returns to Nick Carraway in the years following the events of The Great Gatsby, imagining the interval between experience and authorship. Disillusioned by his time in the East and haunted by the memory of Jay Gatsby, Nick leaves New York and returns to his hometown of Saint Paul, where family obligation, unfinished loyalties, and unresolved grief press in on him.

Set between 1922 and 1924, the novel traces Nick's gradual reckoning with the moral weight of what he has witnessed and the life he might yet claim. A brief return to New York forces him to confront the residue of his former world, while relationships both old and new test his capacity for honesty, restraint, and love.

Blending historical texture with literary imagination, Saint Nick is neither sequel nor pastiche, but a meditation on memory, responsibility, and the making of a storyteller. Quiet and formally restrained, the novel stands in conversation with American literary history while remaining firmly its own work. Set both in Saint Paul and New York, Saint Nick addresses the enduring questions of self-invention, class, and moral consequence-questions left unsettled by an earlier literary moment.