Schroder — Amity Gaige

Lyrical and deeply affecting novel recounting the seven days a father spends on the road with his daughter after kidnapping her during a parental visit.

Attending a New England summer camp as an adolescent, young Erik Schroder, a first-
generation East German immigrant adopts a new name and a new persona -- Eric
Kennedy -- in the hopes that it will help him fit in. This fateful white lie will set him on an improbable and ultimately tragic course.

SCHRODER relates the story of Eric's urgent escape years later through the New England countryside with his six-year-old daughter, Meadow, in an attempt to outrun the authorities amidst a heated custody battle with his wife, who will soon discover that her husband is not who he says he is. From a correctional facility, Eric surveys the course of his life in order to understand -- and maybe even explain his behavior: the painful separation from his mother in childhood; a harrowing escape to America with his taciturn father; a romance that withered under a shadow of lies; and his proudest moments and greatest regrets as a flawed but loving father.