Come join us on Thursday, April 17th from 6-7 pm for a wonderful evening with author and part time Lopezian, Michael N. McGregor who will be speaking about his book, The Last Grand Tour.
The Last Grand Tour is narrated by American tour guide Joe Newhouse, who has one last ten-day tour to lead through the mythic lands of Romantic Europe before deciding what to do with his life. His wife has left him, his business is dead, and his love for Europe is on life support. Worse still, the people on his tour don’t want to be there—all, that is, except the beautiful and mysterious Tonia Gluck, whose passion, intelligence, and devotion to art revive Joe’s hope.
As Joe leads his small group of seemingly surly passengers from Munich to Venice, he hears their stories and begins to feel a guarded compassion for them. At the same time, he grows closer and closer to Tonia despite warning signs from her past.
Set in the years just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Last Grand Tour explores the shifting lines between fidelity and freedom, illusion and reality, regret and desire. The past, it reminds us, is always present, even when we think we have broken free. Kirkus Reviews calls it, “A captivating exploration of the promise and burden of passionate love.”
“This book has its roots in my own early days as a tour guide in Europe,” McGregor says. “In my work with Rick Steves and my own company, Halcyon Tours, I found myself perennially intrigued by the way my passengers became individuals over time, their personalities and even their secrets revealed in the intimacy of a shared bus, shared accommodations, and the intensity of being together twenty-four hours a day.”
Pulitzer Prize winner Mitchell S. Jackson calls The Last Grand Tour “an elegant and evocative novel about lives at crossroads” and hails McGregor as “a writer at the height of his powers: creative and intellectual.” Bestselling novelist Chelsea Bieker, describes the book as “a gripping, entertaining, and ultimately transporting novel that feels at once personal and universal” while author Sharma Shields praises it as “a contemporary novel that uncovers an extraordinary timelessness.” “an elegant and evocative novel about lives at crossroads” and hails McGregor as “a writer at the height of his powers: creative and intellectual.”
Michael N. McGregor spent over a decade guiding Americans through Europe, both with Rick Steves and with his own company, Halcyon Tours. One of the many people he met in his travels was the poet Robert Lax, who became the subject of his first book, Pure Act.Pure Act was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award and named one of the top 10 books in American Studies for libraries by the Association of University Presses. A former professor of creative writing, McGregor lives in Seattle, where he hosts the Cascadia Writers-in-Conversation series and runs the website WritingtheNorthwest.com. He has part of each summer on Lopez for the past 35 years. The Last Grand Tour was his first novel.