It’s unlikely that an author’s book-jacket photo has ever invited such close scrutiny as Sam Sussman’s. In 2021, he published an autobiographical essay in Harper’s Magazine which raised the possibility that he was the son of Bob Dylan. Boy from the North Country, which is billed as a novel, expands on the essay without settling its central question, leaving the reader squinting once more at the author’s image, profuse curls, piercing gaze and all. 

‘Strangers had stopped me in the gas station and health food store to tell me that I resembled him,’ the narrator tells us of his teenage years, when his suspicions about his parentage first emerged. His name is Evan – Sussman’s middle name – while the mother figure is referred to as June (Sussman’s mother seems to have been known as Fran). June works as a ‘holistic health practitioner’ from her farmhouse in upstate New York. When the book opens, Evan is twenty-six and living in London, having recently completed a literature degree at Oxford. He’s struggling to write a novel, but draws strength from the thought he might be the son of ‘the most gifted poet of the age’. 

June has encouraged Evan to entertain that possibility while refusing – or being unable – to confirm it. She certainly knew the singer in her ‘early New York days’ as an aspiring actor, and it’s true that Dylan dropped in at the farm years later, approximately nine months before Evan