A Debut Novel
Bob Kneeley
The book he spent his life earning the right to write.
The Novel
“Why do we choose the loop over the leap? Why does the reward of staying the same outweigh the pain of it?”
Sins of Our Origin is a novel about why we repeat ourselves — as people, as institutions, as a country — and what it actually costs to stop. It traces the same failure pattern across relationships, corporations, and government programs: the choice of familiar dysfunction over the discomfort of genuine change. This is not a thesis. It is a story about whether any of us can actually change.
About Bob
I grew up in two New Jerseys. The first was Trenton — riverfront, working class, the kind of place that teaches you early that nobody is coming to fix things. The second was the Shore, where my parents moved when I was still young enough that the salt air felt like a fresh start. I was the second of six children, born across seven years to parents who were still becoming adults while raising us. We were not poor in the dramatic sense. We were something quieter and more instructive: a household where resources were thin, expectations were low, and self-sufficiency was not a virtue so much as a survival requirement.
I spent the next three decades watching how institutions, companies, and people repeat themselves. A journalist by training and a communications executive by career — recognized twice on Institutional Investor’s All-America Executive Team — I worked at the intersection of business, politics, and Latin American markets. I sat in rooms where decisions were made and watched institutions repeat the same mistakes with the confidence of people who had never been asked to measure whether their last idea worked.
I started writing Sins of Our Origin in 2003, put it in a drawer in 2006, and took it out again in 2023. The years between were not wasted. They were more material. I am based in Denver now, near my daughter and two grandchildren. Sins of Our Origin is the book I have been accumulating the right to write since I was a boy in Trenton watching the world and waiting for my turn.
What the Book Explores
You choose who you are. You choose whether you adapt or whether you loop. The Catholic free will framework, the working-class household, the divorce, the failed relationships — none of them become excuses. The book asks whether any of us can truly claim that freedom.
Why do intelligent people and institutions choose the familiar pain of stasis over the uncertain pain of change? This is the intellectual spine of the novel. It runs through every character, every institution, every relationship in the book.
Authentic voice must be earned, not assumed. Bob saved thirty thousand dollars at twenty-one because he knew he hadn’t lived enough to write honestly. Thirty years of material followed. Sins of Our Origin is the result.
From a Nixon poem at thirteen to Bear Stearns to Latin American trade policy, the novel is shaped by a lifetime of watching how power operates versus how it presents itself. Not cynicism. Precision.
Writing is isolating. It costs relationships. It also creates the conditions for the clearest thinking. The novel holds this honestly — the price of paying attention, and what it’s worth.
The founding ideals of equal opportunity and self-determination held not as nostalgia but as an active, demanding standard. The disappointment in this book comes from someone who actually believes the experiment was worth attempting.
The throughline of the book is not escape. It is deliberate interruption. Whether any of us can actually break what was handed to us — that is the question the novel earns the right to ask.
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