The Broken King - by Michael Thomas (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

"There's a bridge of beautiful American prose--lyrical, powerful, fearlessly candid--running straight from James Baldwin to Thomas, who is obviously Baldwin's worthy heir . . . An utterly immersive book."--Francisco Goldman, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Monkey Boy

From the author of Man Gone Down--a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award--comes a deeply personal memoir of race, trauma, alcoholism, parenting, mental illness and ultimately hope in a portrait of three generations of Black American men

In 2007, Michael Thomas launched into the literary world with his award-winning first novel Man Gone Down, a beautiful and devastating story of a Black father trying to claim a piece of the American Dream. Called "powerful and moving . . . an impressive success," by Kaiama L. Glover on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Thomas' debut introduced a writer of prodigious and rare talent. In his long-awaited encore and first work of nonfiction, The Broken King, Thomas explores fathers and sons, lovers and the beloved, trauma and recovery, success and failure in a unique, urgent, and timeless memoir.

The title is borrowed from T.S. Eliot's line in "Little Gidding" "If you came at night like a broken king," and the work ponders the process of being broken. Akin to Baldwin's The Fire Next Time or Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Thomas' memoir unfolds through six powerful, interlocking and overlaying parts focusing on the lives of five men: his father--a philosopher, Boston Red Sox fan, and absent parent; his estranged older brother; his two sons growing up in Brooklyn; and always, heartbreakingly himself. At the center of The Broken King is the story of Thomas' own breakdown, a result of inherited family history and his own experiences, from growing up Black in the Boston suburbs to publishing a prize-winning novel with "the house of Beckett."

Every page of The Broken King rings with the impact of America's sweeping struggle with race and class, education and family, and builds to a brave, meticulous articulation of a creative mind's journey into and out of madness.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Broken King

Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award

One of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books of the Year

One of the Boston Globe's 75 Best Books of the Year

One (of 25) of Publishers Weekly's Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year

Excerpted and adapted as the New Yorker's weekend essay

"[An] entirely mesmerizing memoir . . . with a virtuosic command of language and an eagle eye for punishing detail, Thomas has rendered beautifully an excruciating existence from which it is impossible to turn away . . . And yet, it would be misleading to end with the impression that The Broken King is not a hopeful story. Its very existence, the fact that its harrowing events were witnessed and recorded, amounts to an extraordinary display of human will and resilience."--Thomas Chatterton Williams, New York Times Book Review

"Thomas writes movingly about [fatherhood] without the shellac of so much parenting content . . . [and] his own childhood, which reared its ugly head as he set out to become a father different from his own. "The Broken King" takes readers back there, to Boston in the '70s and to the trauma and racism that shaped Thomas."--Elisabeth Egan, New York Times, Book of the Week

"Thomas arrived on the literary scene in 2006, with Man Gone Down, a novel that garnered rave reviews and won the prestigious International Dublin Literary Award. His long-awaited follow-up is a persistently intense, raw reckoning with the generations of trauma in his family and with his own struggles as an artist and father."--Washington Post

"It's a book that grows more affecting the longer one spends with it, and it has the power, in the end, to break one's heart . . . Mr. Thomas' account of realizing he was 'insane' can stand alongside such harrowing accounts as William Styron's Darkness Visible and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted."--Wall Street Journal

"Thomas is a prose stylist known for painful honesty and here he digs into the family and childhood that made him. By turns raw and exquisitely lyrical, this is a very compelling memoir about American manhood."--Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe, "75 Best Books of 2025"

"It's a brilliant book . . . It's an amazing book. It is a book of grim beauty, it is a painful book, but it is a triumph, too . . . I loved this book, and I urge you to read it."--Bill Goldstein, WNBC

"A prize-winning writer's anguish . . . Thomas believes that one way to keep "from falling into darkness" is to try "to make something beautiful." This book hits the mark . . . A powerful memoir of childhood trauma, literary success, and mental illness."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Novelist Thomas (Man Gone Down) makes his nonfiction debut with a haunting and poetic profile of the men in his family . . . Thomas's memories and reflections accumulate into a poignant and potent mosaic, chronicling his attempts to overcome family dysfunction and fumble his way toward stability. It's a stirring achievement."--Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"Absorbing . . . Intimate . . . Grappling with his own addictions, mental illness, and past trauma, all while aspiring to be a wholly present husband, father, brother, and son, [Thomas] details his life from growing up in the Boston suburbs through his young fatherhood and finding his path as a Black man in America. Thomas is a captivating writer, infusing his passages with turns of phrase and language that are at once powerful and delicate, always encompassing the complexity of Black fatherhood and elegantly dissecting the consequences of societal pressure. For fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates."--Allison Escoto, Booklist (starred review)

"Gorgeous, lush . . . Thomas infuses his memoir with a powerful, beautiful hope"--Kathryne Cardwell, Winnipeg Free Press

"Michael Thomas has written a truly extraordinary memoir, one that sears and sings with such terrible, beautiful honesty it will burn its way deep into your bones. The Broken King is a book for now, but feels like it's always been part of the world in the way only great literature does. This hardscrabble lyric masterpiece is funny and brutal, soaring and chthonic. A triumph, and reading it will leave you changed. It's genuinely one of the most extraordinary and magical books I have ever read. I'm full of awe."--Helen Macdonald, New York Times bestselling author of H Is for Hawk

"Lord knows, Michael Thomas has paid some dues. He writes on the perils of being Black in America; the sorrows of damaged family; struggles with a self-destructive and treacherous self; of love, work, and ambition; of a mixed-race marriage and of fatherhood with its wondrous mysteries, terrors, joys. There's a bridge of beautiful American prose--lyrical, powerful, fearlessly candid--running straight from James Baldwin to Thomas, who is obviously Baldwin's worthy heir. But The Broken King also harkens back to Melville, Emerson, and spans our own time too, as if in transatlantic conversation with Knausgaard. Like all those titans, Thomas writes about the struggle to be a man, and, simply and most complexly, on how to live. An utterly immersive book." --Francisco Goldman, author of Pulitzer Prize-finalist Monkey Boy

"By turns raw and lyrical, captivating and vexing, The Broken King is vivid testament to the damage wrought by personal and generational trauma--and to the power of art to lay bare what cannot otherwise be said."--Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House

"The Broken King is a radically vulnerable story about men--Black men--fathers and sons, brothers and keepers. We know how these stories end--and yet here, in these pages, these passed-down wounds are transformed into brilliance, beauty, a map of survival."--Danzy Senna, author of Colored Television

"The Broken King is one of the most harrowing, heartbreaking, and stunningly written books I've ever read: a flat-out brilliant memoir that reads like a psychological thriller. Michael Thomas uses his immense skill as a novelist to summon vivid scenes from throughout his life as he explores the racial chasm that is our broken nation and the darkest corridors of his own mind. As he grapples with how to be a son, brother, husband, and father, Thomas creates a love story that is especially poignant coming from a man who believes he has only ever been able to express love in retrospect--and yet who has written a beautiful work overflowing with love."--Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club

"With candor and poetic grace, Michael Thomas's The Broken King invites readers on a deeply personal journey through race, resilience, and family--an unforgettable memoir that feels both intimate and universal."--Paul Yamazaki, City Lights Booksellers

Praise for Man Gone Down

"Powerful and moving . . . An impressive success . . . [Thomas] knows how the odds are stacked in America. He knows the unlikelihood of successful black fatherhood. He knows that things are set up to keep the Other poor and the poor in their place. More than anything else, he knows how little but also--fortunately--how much it can take to bring a man down." --Kaiama L. Glover, New York Times Book Review in a front page review

"[A] jazzy, sinewy debut . . . Thomas's urgent, quicksilver prose makes even the darkest moments of this novel shine."--Cathleen Medwich, O: The Oprah Magazine

"A ravishing blues for the soul's unending loneliness."--Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"The narrator's hard-bitten realism and Thomas's blues-dirge-y storytelling instincts keep the narrative thrumming."--Jonathan Durbin, People

"Ambitious . . . The book is filled with some virtuoso passages that expose the subtle degrees of racism in the narrator's world."--Kirkus Reviews

"What a novel, and what a writer. Michael Thomas is brilliant, and Man Gone Down is riveting. Every page vibrates with love and anger and hope."--Elizabeth Gaffney, author of Metropolis

"Thomas's knack for bonding the reader with a number of New York characters is admirable, and the narrator's thoughts about his marriage, work and racial tension are as graceful as they are blunt . . . Thomas's subtle prose casts a new light on urban life in Brooklyn--even if you already live there." --Cherie Dennis, Time Out New York

"Like the characters of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, whom [Thomas] references throughout the novel with recognizable phrases, themes and quotes, [the] unnamed narrator is a black man concerned with identity in a decidedly white America . . . Thomas imbues the story with an intense pace and urgency as he explores masculinity, humanity and where the narrator - a self-proclaimed 'social experiment' - fits in . . . In the end, the novel itself is rather like its main character: a brilliant and frustrating social experiment that is still quite worthy of our attention."--Tina McElroy Ansa, Washington Post

"A real uncertainty haunts Man Gone Down and its landscapes, sticking to their edges. It captures human flux."--Tess Taylor, San Francisco Chronicle

"Michael Thomas' Man Gone Down moves along nicely. His unnamed narrator is broke, estranged from his wife and children and temporarily living in a friend's child's room, while desperately trying to figure out his life. This debut has racism at its core, but there's much more to it than that."--Martin Zimmerman, San Diego Union Tribune

About the Author

Michael Thomas is the author of the national bestseller Man Gone Down, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and in Ben George's anthology The Book of Dads. He is a professor of English at Hunter College. He lives in Brooklyn.