Author: Lars Saabye Christensen Year: 2001 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Fiction
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ISBNs: 9781559707596 9780552572125 1559707593 0552572128 |
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A masterpiece that Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, hailed as "one of the literary must-reads of the summer" and that the Independent in London likened to "Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions meeting Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections".
The Half Brother is a truly gripping, epic novel, hugely ambitious in scope and utterly compelling, a wonderful mixture of surreal comedy and touching intimacy. In stunning detail and elegant prose, it relates the lives of four generations of a far from ordinary family. It opens on May 8, 1945, when 20-year-old Vera, hoping to celebrate the end of World War II with her mother and grandmother, is brutally raped by an unknown assailant. From that crime is born a boy named Fred, a misfit who later becomes a boxer.
Barnum, Vera's other son born several years later, and Fred form a bizarre but special relationship. "I should have been your father," Fred tells Barnum, "instead of the fool who says he is." Spanning 50 years, filled with a wonderful galaxy of finely etched characters, and structurally brilliant, The Half Brother has been both a literary sensation and a bestseller wherever it has been published.
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