Homer And Langley

Description

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, THE KANSAS CITY STAR, AND BOOKLIST

 

Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers--the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley's proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers--wars, political movements, technological advances--and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.

Reviews

** 'Exquisite writing, an extraordinary story and a charmingly wry take on life and all its inconvenience' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY ** 'Beguiling ... Doctorow shows how each decade leaves a distinct thumbprint on the siblings, to the extent that one starts to regard them as an unwitting index of changing times in America at large' GUARDIAN ** 'The interweaving of the epic and the domestic makes for a fascinating read' DAILY MAIL ** 'Doctorow's work grants inner life to historical personages and revives the past in fine grained detail ... like Doctorow's best written earlier books, Homer and Langley prompts one to question the purpose of formal punctuation, familiar spelling and conventional grammar when this novelist can write dialogue without quotation marks and repeatedly change the subject of a sentence and deploy dead usages without ever losing or confusing the reader' TLS **' 'Remarkable ... a burnished jewel ' OBSERVER

Author description

E.L. Doctorow is one of America's most accomplished and acclaimed living writers. Winner of (among others) the National Book Award, he is the author of ten novels that have explored the drama of American life from the late 19th century to the 21st.