The thirtieth novel from one of today's genuine literary icons, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is a riveting tour de force of character, storytelling, and suspense that provocatively illuminates a timely issue of universal concern. Join us for a special New York reading and signing at the book launch party with one of America's most revered living authors.

About the book:
In this novel, Mosley presents a compact, potent, and suspenseful story about aging, memory, history, and family. In addition, he has drawn on his personal experience as the son of an elderly mother to address one of the country's most urgent social concerns. As members of the baby boom generation age, they must not only care for mentally and physically ailing parents, but also plan for their own challenges as seniors. Furthermore, Mosley has created what is perhaps his strongest female leading character to date, in the form of a strong, resourceful, and complex seventeen-year-old African-American.

Ever since the death of his bewitching wife, Sensia, decades ago, ninety-one-year-old Ptolemy Grey has lived a constricted existence, confined by the walls of his decrepit apartment, the violence in the streets of his contemporary Los Angeles neighborhood, and the limitations of his rapidly deteriorating mind. Rambling amid his rich but confused memories, which extend back to his childhood in segregated Mississippi, Ptolemy has had only one trusted connection to the wider world—his grandnephew, Reggie. After a drive-by shooter's bullet severs that connection forever, Ptolemy is at the mercy of less scrupulous relatives until Robyn Small, a family acquaintance, befriends him at Reggie's funeral and steps in to care for him. Ptolemy's love for Robyn is at once chaste and carnal, sparking in him an avid new interest in life and a desire to become at last the man he had always wanted to be, by whatever means necessary.

Early Praise for The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey:

"(Mosley) plays out an intriguing premise in his powerful latest: a man is given a second shot at life, but at the price of a hastened death. Mosley's depiction of the indignities of old age is heartbreaking, and Ptolemy's grace and decency make for a wonderful character and a moving novel."
– Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Mosley's dramatic departure from his Easy Rawlins and Leonid McGill crime novels appears to be a very personal one, a deeply thoughtful, provocative, and often beautiful meditation on aging, memory, family, loss, and love."
– Booklist (starred review)

"Borrowing from Faust, the Iliad and Gran Torino, Mosley (Known to Evil, 2010, etc.) unforgettably transforms Ptolemy's cacophony of memories into a powerful symphony that makes him ³into many men from out of all the lives he had lived through the decades."
– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is a beautiful meditation on love, frailty and old age. Filled with Walter Mosley's signature humor and narrative mastery, it is as much a page turner as it is a heart tugger. It is a novel that stays with you long after you read the last word and immediately urges you to read it again."
– Edwidge Danticat

About the author:

Walter Mosley is one of America's most highly praised and best-known writers. He is the author of the Easy Rawlins and Leonid McGill mystery series, as well as many other novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. His first Leonid McGill Mystery, The Long Fall, was a New York Times bestseller. His fiction has been published in The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, and Savoy, among other publications; he also writes for The Nation. Mosley has received numerous honors, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America's Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.