description: Winner of National Book Critics Award For Fiction. The Best novel of the year...utterly original and deeply moving. From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel. Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original homage to the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.
language: English
title: Motherless Brooklyn
titlecomplete: Motherless Brooklyn
characters: Laura Rose, Moses Randolph, Frank Minna, Lionel Essrog, Tony Vermonte
genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Mystery, Mystery Thriller, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, New York, Crime, Audiobook
ratings_count: 40347
places: Brooklyn, New York City, New York
awards: awardedAt: 915177600000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: The Macallan Gold Dagger
category: Fiction
publisher: Faber and Faber