The Star Rover

<i>The Star Rover</i> is the story of San Quentin death-row inmate Darrell Standing, who escapes the horror of prison life—and long stretches in a straitjacket—by withdrawing into vivid dreams of past lives, including incarnations as a French nobleman and an Englishman in medieval Korea. Based on the life and imprisonment of Jack London’s friend Ed Morrell, this is one of the author’s most complex and original works. As Lorenzo Carcaterra argues in his Introduction, <i>The Star Rover</i> is “written with energy and force, brilliantly marching between the netherworlds of brutality and beauty.â€