Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 276
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143029169
Description
Under its Editor's Choice series, this novel is a hand-picked selection of the best contemporary books in print around the world. It is a novel about searching: for people and places that no longer exist. Exuberant and wise, hysterically funny and deeply moving, this is an astonishing debut.
For the hidden truths that haunt every family, and for the delicate but necessary tales that link past and future.
With weathered photography in hand, a young man visits the Ukraine to find the woman who might, or might not, have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by Alex, his youthful and seriously inadequate Ukrainian translator, an old man haunted by his memories of the war, and a mongrel bitch named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, he is led on quixotic search across a devastated landscape and back into an unexpected past. In an arresting blend of high comedy and deep tragedy, as their journey moves backwards in time, the fantastical history moves backwards in time, the fantastical history moves forwards, until reality collides with fiction in a heart-stopping scene of extraordinary power.