Waxwings

From the best-selling author of Passage to Juneau--"Raban at his best," wrote Ian McEwan--an unsettling, tender, and always surprising novel set in Seattle at the turn of the millennium, when the high-tech Gold Rush threatens to overwhelm the actual world with its myriad virtual alternatives. Two immigrants, though, are drawn here by more traditional versions of the American Dream. For Tom Janeway--a Hungarian-born Englishman--it is the wife and son he thought he'd never have. For an illegal alien--Chick, as he comes to call himself--it is the land of opportunity he'd imagined back in Fujian province. Given the overheated service economy, mutual need introduces the writer-professor-NPR-commentator to this enterprising handyman, and each soon finds himself strangely dependent on the other. Because meanwhile, all around them, people are busily charting futures that are obscure to, or exclude, anyone else. Waxwings masterfully depicts the social realities of a boomtown in flux, as well as the illusions that distract its inhabitants from the most basic human impulse: to create a place we can call home. This is what Chick dreams of achieving, and what Tom must suddenly struggle to preserve. As the NASDAQ index spirals upward, street riots break out, a terrorist is arrested, a child disappears, a jetliner goes down--and the city, rimmed with feral countryside, begins to emerge in its true colors. "The Washington Post "proclaimed of Foreign Land that "Jonathan Raban's achievements in this novel are nothing short of awesome," and with Waxwings--exquisitely written and hugely entertaining--he demonstrates more powerfully than ever before that he "invests his characters with suchfreshness and warmth, writes prose of such Wordsworth-like beauty, and does it all with such effortless mastery that he takes the reader's breath away."

Review :
"A generous, affirming novel." --"The New York Times Book Review ""The appearance of a new book by Jonathan Raban is a bit like the arrival of an unheralded comet. The heavens gently part and suddenly, here in orbit, shimmering with novelty, is a distinguished newcomer from an unimagined world." --Michael Thompson-Noel, "Financial Times """Waxwings" teems with juicy, funny characters emblematic of their time and place . . . Raban knows how to bridge the gap between the broad social canvas of satire and the interior life of delicate, rounded characters." --"Entertainment Weekly" "Jonathan Raban calculates the radius of the Internet bubble with the cool eye of an investor who can spot real value [and] captures this exuberant era with striking efficiency. He prods us to consider that we're living in a period that makes us all somehow foreigners, desperate for residency." --"The Christian Science Monitor" "Raban is a canny writer . . . This is a generous, affirming novel." --"The New York Times Book Review"