Gossip over Bob Dylan's "love child" has reignited with the publication of a new book.

Author Sam Sussman has speculated the folk singer may be his biological father - and his new novel features a lead character with the same question about his paternity.

A synopsis from the book's publisher, Penguin Random House Boy, stated that Boy from the North Country is about a young man's mother sharing a "creatively intense, emotionally turbulent romance with Bob Dylan". The woman's son, Evan, grows up to obsess over Bob, "whom strangers have long insisted he resembles".

In a case of art imitating life, Sam, 34, has previously written extensively about his mother's affair with the gravel-voiced musician as well as his alleged physical resemblance to Bob, which he claimed people had often pointed out to him.

"At first it was thrilling," Sam told The Independent in an interview published this week. "Who doesn't want to be told they look like a cultural icon?"

After his mother revealed she had in fact "dated" Bob in the 1970s and had reunited with him nine months before Sam was born, the novelist felt too uncomfortable to mention the subject.

"I just didn't want to have that conversation with people any more," he explained.

A representative for Bob, 84, told the Daily Mail the singer had no comment, as was the case in 2021 when Sam first published an essay in Harper's Magazine about the imagined paternity.