Sutton

Willie Sutton was driven by two things—a lost love and a deep hatred of banks. Among the most notorious criminals in American history and in the same pantheon as Al Capone and John Dillinger, known to police as the Babe Ruth of Bank Robbers, Sutton spent half his life, off and on, in prison, until Christmas Eve 1969, when he walked out for good. His surprise pardon sparked a media frenzy. Every journalist and talk show host in America wanted an interview. But Sutton granted just one.Sixty-eight years old, in failing health, he spent all that first night and the next day with a newspaper reporter and photographer, driving around New York City, visiting the scenes of his many crimes, betrayals, heartbreaks, and escapes. The result was a strangely cursory front-page story, filled with half-truths, errors, and few revelations. Notably absent was any mention of Sutton’s first love, the girl who led him into a life of crime, who was his first accomplice, who broke his heart.J.R. Moehringer—Pulitzer Prize winner, author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed memoir The Tender Bar, and coauthor of Andre Agassi’s Open—begins the novel with Sutton’s prison pardon in 1969 and brings his infamous encounter with the reporter to life through vivid and poignant period detail. Sutton is a comic, poignant imagining of that mysterious Christmas, and the remarkable life that preceded it, the center of which was a doomed, dangerous romance.