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 sections focusing on the lives of five men: his father—a philosopher, Boston Red Sox fan, and absent parent; his estranged, lawless older brother; his two sons growing up in Brooklyn; and ultimately, 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 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