This year's Big American Novel is a high-concept epic that races through one family's experience of the twentieth century

John Wray is the author of Lowboy, Canaan's Tongue,The Right Hand of Sleep and The Lost Time Accidents. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, and a Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists in 2007. A citizen of both the United States and Austria, he lives in New York City.