Telegraph Avenue
From Michael Chabon, the bestselling author of THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY – his first novel in five years is a lovingly painted pop-culture epic.
One street in Oakland, California. As the summer draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are hanging in there, co-regents of Brokeland Records. Their wives, Gwen and Aviva, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of legendary midwives.
When former star quarterback Gibson Goode announces plans to dump his latest Dogpile megastore on Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear the worst for their vulnerable little enterprise, as behind Goode’s proposal lurks a nefarious scheme.
While their husbands struggle to mount a defence, Aviva and Gwen find themselves caught up in a professional battle that tests their friendship. And into their already tangled lives comes Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged.
An intimate epic set to the laid-back beat of classic soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all of its own, TELEGRAPH AVENUE is Michael Chabon’s most dazzling book yet.
”'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
”'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
”'Chabon’s metaphors and similes can be wonderfully surreal… Telegraph Avenue is about many things: music, race relations, nostalgia, childbearing, husbands and wives, fathers and sons. Ultimately, however, it is a realist novel about the power of imaginary worlds to liberate or constrain” - Times Literary Supplement
”'A multi-generational, anatomy-of-a-community doorstopper with a plot like clockwork and sentences like toffee” - Sunday Telegraph