monk of O'Farrell

San Francisco, October 1971. A man named Emmett Harlan walks into the Tenderloin with three dollars in his pocket, nine years on the run from Alcatraz, and nothing left to lose. On the fourth floor of a hotel on Turk Street, he finds an open door and a dead man in a brown wool habit. The man was a Franciscan brother. He has been dead for twelve hours. No one knows yet.Emmett takes the wool. He takes the rosary. He takes the cord with three knots. He moves into the empty room down the hall, and at six the next morning he walks down to the soup kitchen at Saint Boniface and begins ladling soup.He is not a Franciscan. He has no canonical right to wear what he wears or do what the wool asks him to do. The pastor knows. The Vietnamese restaurant owner across the street knows. A woman on the corner of O'Farrell and Leavenworth knows. The federal marshal who has been hunting him for nine years and seven months has his name written down on a list of nine men.In the eleven and a half weeks before the apprehension, and the year and one month after it, the man inside the wool will become something the man who escaped Alcatraz never imagined he could be — and will discover, too late, that the becoming cannot be undone.A literary novel of mistaken identity, moral weight, and slow grace, set in the fog and neon of the dying Tenderloin. For readers of Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denis Johnson, and Marilynne Robinson.— Bert Callaway