For decades, Leonard Fife has built a prestigious reputation as a documentary filmmaker in Canada, where he fled in the late 1960s as a deserter and fugitive after refusing to fight in Vietnam. That is at least the official version, the one that his admirers have always known, for whom the filmmaker is an irreproachable moral reference. Now, at seventy-eight years old, seriously ill, dazed by medication and facing imminent death, Fife accepts the proposal to answer an interview for a documentary focused on him as a tribute directed by a former disciple. Unexpectedly, the interview will take the form of a long and heartbreaking intimate confession. Because Fife needs, before the final fade to black, to open up to Emma –his wife, his partner for the last forty years– and tell her everything he would be unable to say without a camera involved: the truth of how he became the man she thinks he is.

In The Dropouts, Russell Banks, the acclaimed author of works such as Affliction and Continental Drift, returns on his own to narrate, with his absorbing, deep and emotional style, the story of a man who has spent a lifetime running from himself, and the many betrayals he was forced to commit in that endless flight.

"Russell Banks is the most important American writer on the current literary scene."
The Village Voice

"What the reader will find in The Abandonments is a character, a novel, and a writer who resist entering that good night meekly."
The New York Times