The Lazarus Project - Hardcover

Aleksandar Hemon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330458418 ISBN 13: 9780330458412

Publisher: Picador, 2008

Synopsis

On 2 March 1908, nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, a Russian Jewish immigrant to Chicago, tried to deliver a letter to the home of the city’s Chief of Police, George Shippy. Instead of taking the letter, Shippy shot Averbuch twice, killing him.

Lazarus Averbuch, Shippy claimed, was an anarchist assassin and an agent of foreign operatives who wanted to bring the United States to its knees. His sister, Olga, was left alone and bereft in a city – and country – seething with political and ethnic tensions.

In the twenty-first century, Brik, a young Bosnian writer in Chicago, becomes obsessed with finding out the truth of what happened to Lazarus. And so Brik and his friend Rora, a charming and unreliable photographer, set off on a journey back to Lazarus Averbuch’s birthplace, through a history of pogroms and poverty and a present of gangsters and prostitutes.

‘Masterful . . . troubling, funny and redemptive . . . ingenious . . . Hemon is as much a writer of the senses as of the intellect. He can be very funny: the novel is full of jokes and linguistic riffs that justify comparisons to Nabokov' Washington Post

'The fearless and spirited expression of a turbulent literary talent . . . For all Hemon's nods to other writers -- one catches glimpses not only of Nabokov and Sebald but of Bulgakov, Pamuk, Amis, Poe -- he is entirely his own man, an original who owes no debts to anyone' Patrick McGrath, Book Forum

‘Profoundly moving . . . A literary page-turner that combines narrative momentum with meditations on identity and mortality’ Kirkus

About this title

Review

'An intricate, gripping read.'
-- The Big Issue

'Charged with fury and empathy, Hemon's sentences seethe and hiss...creating an excoriating novel of rare moral clarity' -- Booklist

'Hemon brings us a novel worth reading with as much fire as its composition must have demanded.' -- Library Journal

'Hemon shows astonishing skill in his adopted English...There are extraordinarily powerful verbal images.' -- Sunday Times

'Hemon unpacks his haunting material with skill and exhilarating wit' -- Harper's Bazaar

'One of the best books of the year so far' (seems churlish to point out that it's not published yet...!)
-- Financial Times

'Profoundly moving . . . A literary page-turner that combines narrative momentum with meditations on identity and mortality' -- Kirkus

'The Lazarus Project raises questions of what it is to belong, illuminating fragments of history along the way.' -- Bookseller

'This is easily [Hemon's] best work to date: building up an intricately tessellated portrait of flight and emigration...'
-- Evening Standard

`A haunting study of despair and loss, death and dreams, identity and home...An outstanding contribution to immigrant literature' -- The Times

Book Description

‘Aleksandar Hemon has established himself as that rare thing, an essential writer’ Tim Adams, Observer

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0330458418
• ISBN 13: 9780330458412
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 294