The Street Sweeper
Elliot Perlman - Author
ISBN 9781594488474 | 640 pages | 05 Jan 2012 | Riverhead | 6.41 x 9.21in | 18 - AND UP
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Lamont Williams is a paroled felon looking to turn his life around, working as a street sweeper at a large city hospital and searching for his estranged daughter. Adam Zignelik is a struggling, nontenured professor, paralyzed by looming failure, his life falling apart around him. He discovers a cache of recordings of previously unheard voices reaching out from a horrific past, voices that can both save his career and bring him back to the woman he loves. At the same time, Lamont forges an unlikely friendship with a dying man, who, having lived through those horrors, has a crucially important story to tell and to preserve. The worlds surrounding these two men, their families, their pasts, their potential futures, swirl in and out of history as the forces of the Holocaust, the American civil rights movement, Chicago unions, and New York City racial politics combine in a thrilling cross- generational literary symphony. The acclaimed author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Elliot Perlman weaves the narratives of Lamont and Adam-and their myriad connected friends, lovers, and families-into an ambitious, masterful depiction of the power that memory has over our lives. Praise for Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper “[I]t seems somehow fitting that the author of The Street Sweeper, a wonderfully rich, engaging and multilayered new novel about blacks and Jews in Chicago and New York, would hail from Australia. I’ve been a fan of Elliot Perlman’s work since his 1998 novel Three Dollars. That book and his massive Seven Types of Ambiguity (2004) revealed him to be an author of rare erudition and compassion. But The Street Sweeper is his boldest work yet…” – The Washington Post “The Street Sweeper is an impressive literary achievement, complex in its organization, meticulous in its plotting and deeply satisfying in its emotional payoffs.” – The Wall Street Journal “In the best kind of books, there is always that moment when the words on the page swallow the world outside — subway stations fly by, errands go un-run, rational bedtimes are abandoned — and the only goal is to gobble up the next paragraph, and the next, and the next… A towering achievement: a strikingly modern literary novel that brings the ugliest moments of 20th-century history to life, and finds real beauty there.” – Entertainment Weekly “As characters interact and fates intertwine, Perlman tells an engaging multi-generational saga witnessing personal histories that heroically endure and survive brutal and horrific racism to become what we know as the history of the Holocaust and the American Civil Rights movement. At his best, Perlman accomplishes this literary feat by evoking remarkable depth and meaning in otherwise commonplace events and characters…. [W]hat is most memorable about this richly woven tale is the lessons about the importance of memory and remembering, and the novel’s underlying compassion and sense of history.” – USA Today “An epic tale that spans decades and bridges generations while chronicling the predominant chapters of racial persecution perpetrated in the darkest hours of the 20th century… Perlman is a consummate storyteller… This stunning novel works, and matters, because of the expert way Perlman has recorded both the agonized howl of the past and the plaintive echoes of the present.” – San Francisco Chronicle “The Street Sweeper connects up its large cast of characters, telling a grim but buoyant story, full of humanity and brave acts. Reading it provides that uncommon thrill in fiction: a philosophical page-turner.” – Cleveland Plain Dealer “The Street Sweeper is a big novel in every sense… It’s filled with color and characters whose unlikely connection tells the stories of contemporary New York, 1930s Warsaw and 1950s Chicago.” – The Forward “Perlman offers an affecting meditation on memory itself, on storytelling as an act of healing.” – The Guardian (UK) “An expertly told novel of life in immigrant America--and of the terrible events left behind in the old country.” – Kirkus Reviews (STARRED) “Brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement.... A moving and literate page-turner.” – Publishers Weekly (STARRED) “Perlman’s compulsively readable wrestle-with-evil saga is intimate and monumental, wrenching and cathartic.” – Booklist (STARRED) |
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