NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Jonathan Safran Foer's debut--"a funny,
moving...deeply felt novel about the dangers of confronting the past and
the redemption that comes with laughing at it, even when that seems all
but impossible." (Time)
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man--also named
Jonathan Safran Foer--sets out to find the woman who might or might not
have saved his grandfather from the Nazis.
Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog
named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young
Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English,
Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and
into an unexpected past.
As their adventure unfolds, Jonathan imagines the history of his
grandfather's village, conjuring a magical fable of startling symmetries
that unite generations across time. As his search moves back in time,
the fantastical history moves forward, until reality collides with
fiction in a heart-stopping scene of extraordinary power.
"Imagine a novel as verbally cunning as A Clockwork Orange, as
harrowing as The Painted Bird, as exuberant and twee as Candide, and
you have Everything Is Illuminated . . . Read it, and you'll feel
altered, chastened--seared in the fire of something new." -- Washington
Post
"A rambunctious tour de force of inventive and intelligent storytelling
. . . Foer can place his reader's hand on the heart of human experience,
the transcendent beauty of human connections. Read, you can feel the
life beating." -- Philadelphia Inquirer
