Telegraph Avenue - Hardcover

Chabon, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007288751 ISBN 13: 9780007288755

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2012

Synopsis

Telegraph Avenue:

About this title

Review:

‘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

From the Back Cover:

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there--longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart--half tavern, half temple--stands Brokeland.

When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life.

An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all its own, Telegraph Avenue is the great American novel we've been waiting for. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0007288751
• ISBN 13: 9780007288755
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480