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He recently discussed how his concise novel started as a 3,000-page first draft, what he wants his students to understand and why he doesn’t consider this a novel about Alzheimer’s disease. Henkin, who heads the MFA fiction writing program at Brooklyn College, writes about big emotional moments in a low-key, understated way.

Henkin also writes about the relationship between Pru and Ginny, Robin’s no-nonsense caregiver. This tender and touching novel explores the full lives of Robin’s family - his wife, Pru, his daughter Sarah and his son Arlo from an earlier marriage - as well as how his illness impacts them. Nor is it, actually, a book about the disease. While the character Robin is “very similar to my dad,” Henkin says, this is not an autobiographical book. Henkin’s father was also a Columbia professor who suffered from Alzheimer’s at the end of his life. In Joshua Henkin’s novel “Morningside Heights,” Spence Robin, an academic giant and long-time Columbia University professor, is stricken with Alzheimer’s disease.

Morningside Heights by Joshua Henkin