The Arrest

(Paperback, Main)

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The Arrest isn't post-apocalypse. It isn't a dystopia. It isn't a utopia. It's just what happens when much of what we take for granted - cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters - stops working...

Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn't hurt.

Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings' life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza Whatever he's up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him.

Written with unrepentant joy and shot through with just the right amount of contemporary dread, The Arrest is speculative fiction at its absolute finest.

'The thing about the best Lethem novels...is that they were such fun. I've read everything he's written since and rarely has a novel approached the sheer pleasure of The Arrest... It is, in short, a blast.' - Observer

Reviews

'The thing about the best Lethem novels - and I'm thinking back to early in his career, toMotherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude - is that they were such fun. I've readeverything he's written since and rarely has a novel approached the sheer pleasureof The Arrest... It is, in short, a blast.' - Observer

'Exuberantly clever... extremely strange, twistily plotted, fizzingly written, not alittle absurd and lingeringly mysterious.' - Daily Telegraph

'Lethem's pithy chapters - some poetic, some sharp, others both - bring thiseerily timely tale to a grim, if wry, conclusion.' - Daily Mail

'Inventive, entertaining and superbly written' - New York Times

Author Bio

Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.