— PRESS KIT

 SAINT NICK

a novel by A.S. Lorde

Publisher: Sea Goat Press | Pub Date: August 25, 2026 | Format: Paperback, 5.25" x 8.5", 312 pages
ISBN: 979-8-234-08472-9 | Price: $23.00 | Genre: Adult/Literary Fiction

THE HOOK

In The Great Gatsby Nick Carraway writes of the man he watched fail at everything he tried and end up shot dead in his own pool:

"No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."

What did Nick mean by all right? And what supposedly restored his interest in the world by the time he sat down to write the book?

Saint Nick is the two years in between.

THE LOGLINE

"The two lost years of The Great Gatsby — what Nick Carraway did after Gatsby died, and how it finally made him write the book we know."

THE PITCH

The Great Gatsby ends. Saint Nick begins where it leaves off.

Nick Carraway comes home to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the fall of 1922, broken by a summer he can't yet explain to anyone — including himself. Over the next two years, as he rebuilds his life inside his family's hardware business, he also comes to terms with the events that will be later recounted in The Great Gatsby.

Saint Nick is that interval between experience and authorship: the recollection behind the novel Fitzgerald had Nick eventually write. Read on its own, it's the story of a man finding his way back to the world. Read alongside Gatsby, it becomes something else — a second novel that recontextualizes the first, resolving decades of scholarly puzzles (a miscounted age, a broken timeline, an infamous ellipsis) not by explaining them away, but by showing exactly where they came from. The two books destabilize each other in equal measure, each unsettling what the other seems to settle.

A NOVEL OPERATING ON MULTIPLE LEVELS

Saint Nick is framed as a recollection Nick assembles in a bathtub at a Lake Forest estate in August 1924 — the uncomposed substrate The Great Gatsby will later be made from. Gatsby opens with Nick reaching for his father's advice — reserve your judgment. Saint Nick opens with him retreating to his mother's teaching, the Golden Rule. Same man, two different parents, two different moments: that distance is the book's architecture. Both novels run exactly nine chapters, the first three of each loosely mirroring the other — the same structure because the same America.

The century-old inconsistencies readers have puzzled over — a child's age off by a year, a timeline that won't reconcile, an elevator ride that ends mid-sentence — aren't errors. They're pressure points where what Nick knew when he wrote the novel shows through what he says about the summer itself. Saint Nick doesn't explain them away; it builds the world their existence implies. Nick never actually witnessed Myrtle Wilson's death — what he knows comes secondhand from Gatsby — and in Saint Nick, Daisy denies driving with the outrage of someone falsely accused. The novel offers no verdict. A reader who carries that back to Gatsby can no longer be certain of its most widely accepted "fact."

The book also gives full expression to material Fitzgerald intended for Gatsby but never fully wrote: a Catholic incarnation motif running underneath the American dream; the structural racism of the 1920s encoded in language Nick uses without noticing its architecture; an antisemitism thread running from Nick's publisher Horace Liveright to a boardroom's dismissal of a Jewish business partnership; more than a dozen women, each given a distinct social and moral position that Nick's own recollection fails to fully see — the female interiority Gatsby was long criticized for missing; and Nick's own sexuality, present in Saint Nick as unprocessed experience and in Gatsby as encoding — the army friend barely seen in a field at night, the McKee photographs, that elevator ride that ends mid-sentence.

The historical research underneath it is deliberate, not decorative: Benjamin Marshall, literally nicknamed "the Great Gatsby of Chicago" by his contemporaries; Edith Cummings, the real golfer behind Jordan Baker; Howard Van Doren Shaw's Lake Forest estate, already a fairy tale before the novel needed it to be. And the comedy — Klipspringer squatting in Gatsby's empty mansion, a dog named Daisy — isn't relief from the argument. It's how the argument gets made.

THE TEST

A reader who finishes Saint Nick should return to The Great Gatsby and find it changed — not explained, not supplemented, changed. The two novels are built to sit in permanent, irresolvable tension: each destabilizes what the other appears to settle, each casts light on what the other chose to leave in shadow. For every reader who encounters them, now and after, both books are richer, stranger, and more honest for the other's existence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A.S. Lorde holds a BA in Historical Studies and spent four years researching and writing Saint Nick, drawing on primary historical sources and scholarly critical essays devoted to The Great Gatsby, itself. He lives in Texas.