Excerpt from I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Within weeks of publication Michael was receiving requests for interviews and to appear on talk shows. The New York Times, which had once run his pieces, now ran a profile on him instead. While he was researching and writing the book he'd neglected his personal life. Although he'd begun a couple of relationships, none of them had withstood the intensity of his research, nor his split existence at each end of the island. Increasingly his thoughts had been taken up with the brothers, and then with the writing of the book, with their lives in its pages. For five years he'd lived not just alongside Nico and Raoul, but also often through them, his own life becom­ing a shell of routine and observation. Now, though, on the other side of the book's publication, women suddenly seemed available to him. He was thirty-five and single, and had been anointed by New York success. He started seeing his publicist. Then there'd been a Dominican journalist. Her interview with him had been challenging, even aggressive. But afterwards she'd invited him to dinner and they'd soon become a couple. When that had eventu­ally ended, in the weeks following a reading at Columbia, Michael had gone home with not one but two of the students who'd been in the audience.

He was aware of the clichés he was living, of how predictable it looked. But, he told himself, he wasn't harming anyone, and wasn't this, perhaps, part of what he'd earned during those three years of riding the A train the length of the island and then another two sitting alone at his desk? But above all Michael had known it wouldn't last, and that's why he'd given himself so willingly to his unlikely present, half expecting every day to wake and find it already transfigured into his past.

For Nico and Raoul, BrotherHoods and its author became another disappointment in their lives, confirmation, as they'd always suspected, that the world was set against them. Michael tried to keep in touch with them, but with the appearance of the book their already diverging paths accelerated. While Nico served his time upstate and Raoul sat out his self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, Michael's publisher sent him on a national book tour. In a series of events across the country, despite his uneasiness in front of an audi­ence, Michael began to discover a public persona—a diffident, dry humour that journalists and publicists billed as "British." On the underlying issues of the book, though, he was never anything other than serious. The title, he'd explain to smatterings of readers in Ohio and Carolina, and then again to capacity auditoriums in Los Angeles and Austin, referred to us all. Not just to Nico and Raoul and the territories over which they and their peers fought, but also to the cheek-by-jowl neighbourhoods of Manhattan, of America, the world. Look about you, he'd told them. These people and their stories are happening under your nose. Their story is our story. No man, woman, or child is an island. Yes, the book was about two young Dominican men in Inwood, but it was also, through them, about us all, about our ability to live close, and yet so far from one another.

The audiences had nodded, applauded, and afterwards asked for Michael's signature on the title page of the book. When the paperback was published he donated a percentage of his royalties to education projects in Inwood and Washington Heights. But still, every time he said his sentence about neighbourhoods, about living close and far, he knew he himself was moving further away from the brothers who'd first lent him their lives. As he'd moved across the country on his tour, from hotel to airport to university, so Nico and Raoul had moved, too. Nico from cell to refectory to exercise yard and back to his cell again. Raoul from his cousin's bedsit in Pennsylvania to another in Albany, to the room of a girl he'd met on the street, to the couch of her friend. Within just a few months the years Michael had shared with the brothers had become undone, unravelled by the publication of his story about their time together.

Excerpted from I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers. Copyright © 2015 by Owen Sheers. Excerpted by permission of Nan A. Talese. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.