It has been fourteen years since Irvin Faust's last novel, and Jim Dandy is well worth the wait. Once again Faust displays his dazzling talent for reimagining history, his uncanny ear for dialogue, and his ability to realize marvelous characters.

Jim Dandy is Hollis Cleveland: smart, resourceful, tough-minded, handsome, a man who seems to have all the gifts and talent to take him anywhere he wants to go. But Hollis Cleveland is black, the year is 1936, and his options are, as he would say, limited. So he becomes a successful numbers runner until he double-crosses the man who controls Harlem. That casually made decision brings extremely fateful consequences, chief among them the flight for safety and his life.

His escape plunges him into some of the most notable events of that watershed year. For in 1936 America is still in depression; in Europe, British and French fascism is bubbling up alongside the Nazi model; in Spain the world is taking sides in a deadly civil conflict; and in Africa Mussolini is making his grab for Ethiopia.

1. Much of this turmoil ensnares Cleveland-Dandy, but none so deeply or violently as the Italo-Ethiopian war. His odyssey in Africa, accompanied by a soldier-of-fortune known as Ace, is a brilliant evocation of abiding questions and moral choices about race, national interest, loyalty, and good and evil that are as primary today as they were almost sixty years ago. When he returns to America, Cleveland-Dandy must again choose which way to go - and he does this in a shattering conclusion.

The many voices of this brilliantly rendered novel speak warningly to us today. Meticulously researched, beautifully written, Jim Dandy is a fascinating story of a complicated man's struggle to find out who and what he is in a world that is spinning out of control.