The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Collins Modern Classics)

(Paperback)

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The winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction from the author of Wonder Boys. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a heart-wrenching story of escape, love and comic-book heroes set in Prague, New York and the Arctic.
One night in 1939, Josef Kavalier shuffles into his cousin Sam Clays cramped New York bedroom, his nerve-racking escape from Prague finally achieved. Little does he realise that this is the beginning of an extraordinary friendship and even more fruitful business partnership. Together, they create a comic strip called The Escapist, its superhero a Nazi-busting saviour who liberates the oppressed around the world. The Escapist makes their fortune, but Joe can think of only one thing: how can he effect a real-life escape, and free his family from the tyranny of Hitler

Michael Chabons exceptional novel is a thrilling tight-rope walk between high comedy and bitter tragedy, and confirms his position as one of the most inventive and daring of contemporary American writers. In Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay he has created two unforgettable characters bound together by love, family and cartoons.

Reviews

An adventure story that keeps you up until 4am with the bedside lamp on, eager to learn if the Escapist, and Chabon himself, can free the enslaved and lead them home' Observer

This is one of those books that makes the reader want to race through to the find out what happens, while at the same time wishing it will never end Mail on Sunday

Proof of the abiding power of complex, serious, engaged, but above all entertaining story-telling' TLS

'A page-turning epic, sketching World War II as seen through the eyes of two comic book writers' Time Out

'A novel of towering achievement' New York Times

'Absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal' Washington Post

'Full of the kind of exquisitely figurative language and gorgeous sentences for which Chabon is deservedly celebrated' The Inquirer

'An exciting, emotional, exuberant delight. Read it' Chicago Tribune

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.