Foregone

A searing story about memory and betrayal from the acclaimed and bestselling Russell Banks

In his late seventies and dying of cancer, acclaimed Canadian-American documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft dodgers and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War, agrees to a final interview conducted by his acolyte and former student. But unbeknownst to Malcolm, who imagines his portrait of the master will cement his own reputation, Fife has his own plans: an astonishing, dark confession that reaches back to his young adulthood across the border and beyond, witnessed by his wife and the filmmaker’s crew, who struggle to make sense of the dying man’s long-held secrets. Alternating between Fife’s private memories and his efforts to relate them to his listeners, Foregone is a brilliantly structured examination of memory, destiny, and truth.