Telegraph Avenue

(Paperback)

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"The immensely gifted writer and magical prose stylist" Michael Chabon delivers another "bravura epic" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) a big-hearted, exhilarating novel exploring the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland families.
As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there, longtime friends, band mates and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the sketchy yet freewheeling borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland, on the quintessential East Bay avenue that gives the book its title. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary nurse midwives who have welcomed, between them, more than a thousand little citizens into the world. Archy and Gwen are expecting their first baby; Nat and Aviva have a teenaged son, Julius.

When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fourth-richest black man in America, announces plans to go forward with the construction of his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby neglected stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. What they don't know is that Goode's announcement marks the climax of a decades-old secret history, encompassing a forgotten crime of the Black Panther era, the tragedy of Archy's own deadbeat father a long-faded Blaxploitation star named Luther Stallings and the perpetual shining failure of American optimism about race. As their husbands struggle to mount a defense, at Berkeley Birth Partners 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 their already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenaged son Archy has never acknowledged, and the love of 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. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet.

Reviews

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 didnt 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 Crowes film Almost Famous or Richard Linklaters 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

Author Bio

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.