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

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The last time Michael had heard Nico's voice was on a collect call from his correctional facility upstate. Michael was finally moving back to London. His mother, widowed three years previously, was ill. BrotherHoods was due to be published in Britain. It was time for him to leave New York. If he stayed any longer he was worried it would never let him go. Although he'd found his voice in the city, and his story, to remain would have felt like treading water. New York had been about transition. Now that transition had been made, he wanted to move on, which, for a reason he couldn't quite fathom, meant moving back.

When the phone rang Michael had been on his knees among packing boxes and bubble wrap scattered across the floor of his Sullivan Street apartment. He'd accepted the call, but before Nico came on the line he'd flicked the phone to answering machine. He'd already spoken to Nico twice that week and he couldn't take another stilted, awkward conversation. Not now, as he was prepar­ing to leave. So instead he'd just listened, standing in his half-empty apartment, a fire truck's siren insistent on Sixth, as the voice of a man he'd once known as a boy filled his living room.

"Hey, Mikey?" Nico said. He sounded lost in a large space. His voice deep, but somehow shallow, too. "It's me, Nico. You there? Man, it's Nico, pick up."

Michael heard the clang of a door, the crackle and fuzzy speech of a guard's radio.

For a second or two Nico breathed on the line, deliberate and slow. "Huh, well," he'd said eventually. "Hasta luego, bro. Take it easy, yeah?"

The line went dead. The message light began to blink. Michael watched it pulse for a moment, then, sliding his keys off the kitchen table, left the apartment. He pushed through the lobby doors downstairs and crossed the street into the spring light of the morning and walked north towards Washington Square. The higher windows of the buildings were catching the sun, making them flash in the corner of his eye. As he crossed over Prince a cooling breeze ushered a scent of cinnamon and bagels down the street. Michael walked faster into it, as if he were trying to outpace the memory of Nico's voice behind him, or discover some kind of a promise in the sweetness ahead.

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.