'Almost anything is edible with a dab of French mustard on it'

Telegraph Avenue Paperback
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Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon

As summer in Oakland, California, 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. And while their husbands struggle to mount a defence, Aviva and Gwen find themselves caught up in a professional battle that tests their friendship. Then into their already tangled lives comes Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged. An intimate epic that pulses with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all of its own, ‘Telegraph Avenue’ is Michael Chabon’s most dazzling book yet, and a must-read for fans of Nick Hornby’s ‘High Fidelity’.

Reviews of Telegraph Avenue

    • ‘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
    • ‘A sprawling family drama with a soundtrack’ The Times
    • ‘A multi-generational, anatomy-of-a-community doorstopper with a plot like clockwork and sentences like toffee’ Sunday Telegraph

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