Telegraph Avenue

ENG

Michael Chabon is the author of two collections of short stories, 'A Model World' and 'Werewolves in their Youth', the novels 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh', 'Wonder Boys', 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay', 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union' and 'Telegraph Avenue', and the non-fiction books 'Maps and Legends and Manhood for Amateurs'. 'Wonder Boys' has been made into a film starring Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr. and 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, Esquire and Playboy. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and their four children.

'Telegraph Avenue is a wonderful novel ... Wonderfully engaging, exuberantly written ... the world constructed here is one to lose yourself in ... This is a novel that I found myself slowing down while reading, out of sheer pleasure. I put it off, and rationed it out, and just didn't want it to end.' Philip Hensher, Spectator 'Deeply wise and soulful ... What you get is a big, serious, probing American novel, a page-turner that, like Chabon himself, seems to walk the line between high and low culture' Attica Locke, Guardian 'Telegraph Avenue' achieves the blissed-out honey-coloured atmosphere of Cameron Crowe's film 'Almost Famous' or Richard Linklater's 'Dazed and Confused', but is deeper and more intelligent than either of those ... It feels entirely relevant to the uncertainty of the present moment' Sunday Times 'An amazingly rich, emotionally detailed story ... Mr. Chabon can write about just about anything ... with a real, lived-in sense of empathy and passion.' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times 'Like a favourite old jazz LP, its richly pleasurable form beginning to end.' Independent 'Deliriously good and emotionally mature ... The dust jacket describes 'Telegraph Avenue' as a Californian Middlemarch: it is, in Virginia Woolf's sense, that it is "one of the few books written for grown-up people"' Scotland on Sunday 'A multi-generational, anatomy-of-a-community doorstopper with a plot like clockwork and sentences like toffee' Sunday Telegraph 'Much of the wit in "Telegraph Avenue" inheres in Chabon's astonishing prose. I don't just mean the showy bits: a -12-page-long sentence that includes the observations of an escaped parrot, or the lovely, credible scene from Obama's point of view. I mean the offhand brilliance that happens everywhere.' Jennifer Egan, New York Times Sunday