NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER - A complusively
readable riff on the classic detective novel from America's most
inventive novelist.****
"A half-satirical cross between a literary novel and a hard-boiled crime
story narrated by an amateur detective with Tourette's syndrome.... The
dialogue crackles with caustic hilarity.... Unexpectedly moving."
**--**The Boston Globe
Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is 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, captivating homage to
the classic detective novel by one of the most acclaimed writers of his
generation.
