Waxwings
By: Jonathan Raban
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2003
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 310
Subjects: Immigrants -- Washington -- Seattle -- Fiction; Seattle (Wash.) -- Social conditions -- Fiction
Genres: Fiction
Description: "At the turn of the millennium, two immigrants are drawn to the United States by their own versions of the American Dream. For Tom Janeway - a Hungarian-born English intellectual most at home with his books - it's the family he thought he'd never have. For Chick - an illegal alien newly escaped from a cargo container - it's the land of plenty he imagined back in China." "But as the stock market hits a new high, anti-globalist riots break out in the streets, a terrorist is arrested, and a child disappears, the two men's dreams collide in a way neither could have anticipated. Unjustly accused of a horrific crime, estranged from his wife and his beloved young son, Tom's life is rapidly unravelling. Chick, meanwhile, has a burgeoning business by day but no safe place to lay his bed at night. For both, the New World proves surprisingly full of old ways." "Moving rapidly from the sheetrock cubicles of an Internet start-up to fund-raising dinners in lakeside mansions, from brand-new condos to the tents of the homeless, and from businessmen's clubs, trophy cars and hip restaurants to ships being broken up for scrap, Jonathan Raban maps out the complex honeycomb of a boom city in the euphoric winter before the world changed."--BOOK JACKET.