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. 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