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Named a Most Anticipated Book by: New York Times * Boston Globe * CrimeReads
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn comes a sweeping story of community, crime, and gentrification, tracing more than fifty years of life in one Brooklyn neighborhood.
“A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins the whole together: is the crime 'time'? Or the almighty dollar? I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this.” — Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin
On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighborhood its name.
The rules appear obvious at first. But in memory’s prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None who lived through it are ever permitted to forget.
Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers. Jonathan Lethem, “one of America’s greatest storytellers” (Washington Post), has crafted an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we’ve made.
Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Arrest, The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.
"Tracking the slippery, overlapping paths of gentrification and crime are a vast cast of characters for whom time and space bend and retract in this expansive novel." — Boston Globe
“[An] intricately excavated, breathtaking tale of imperiled childhood in a fitfully gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. . . . With Brooklyn as a microcosm of human folly and strife, Lethem’s virtuoso, many-faceted novel is trenchant, hilarious, wrenching, and tender.” — Booklist (starred)
“Jonathan Lethem creates a vivid portrait of the borough of Brooklyn over 50 years of profound social and economic change. . . . Anyone attuned by personal experience to the vibrancy and edginess of New York City life, or who simply enjoys reading about it, will find something to savor here.” — Shelf Awareness
“The latest novel from the bard of Brooklyn is a metafictional collage that tells the story of some fifty years in one neighborhood . . . . It’s funny and wise and weird . . . . [a] love letter to Brooklyn.” — LitHub
“A wild, exuberant ambition that pays off and delivers to readers a true achievement: a book at once full of art and grace and mystery. . . .Lethem proves again why he is a master of the form.”
— CrimeReads
“The levels of mystery here astound. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts and then the parts decide to act alone and challenge the whole. Lethem is not only interrogating the form of the crime novel, but the venture of storytelling itself. All of this while remaining a joy to read, full of strange characters and expertly rendered place. This brilliant, genre-defying work will leave certainly a mark.” — Percival Everett, author of The Trees
"If Dean Street could talk, Brooklyn Crime Novel would be its voice, and it would serve up a half-century of Brooklyn’s dirt—fractured multicultural dreams, waves of gentrification, 'black mayonnaise'—while confessing its many crimes, from shoplifted magazines to blockbusting to murder. An intricate, spellbinding tour of the soul of Brooklyn as it casts off Manhattan’s shadow." — James Hannaham, author of Delicious Foods
“A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins the whole together: is the crime 'time'? Or the almighty dollar? I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this.” — Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin
“Brooklyn Crime Novel isn't what it says it is. In fact, it takes apart the three words of its title, even as it takes each of them very seriously. It loosens the knot that is Brooklyn, city of tangled streets, lost oases, and false fronts. It interrogates what a Crime is—a dance? an exchange? a deal gone wrong? a funny mugging? And it opens up what a Novel can be. This is no soul-affirming flight; no apotheosis of "where I'm from"; no prettified, gentrified tale of trauma; nor is it a winky metafictional gambit; nor a self-important autofictional one. Brooklyn Crime Novel is an inquiry and a tragedy, and as with the oldest crime story ever written, Oedipus Rex, the judge, detective, victim, and accused are one and the same. A deeply moving, fiercely intelligent, and acerbically funny novel about the scandal and disaster of American capital in our time.” — Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows and The Old Drift
“Brooklyn Crime Novel is like a sidewalk studded with diamonds--individual moments in life documented as vividly as that, the reader walking along with the characters through a borough, through buildings and streets and bedrooms, through lifetimes in an American place. Jonathan Lethem has layered a universe here, in a devastatingly meticulous document, a tender yet unsentimental remembrance for an entire world.” — Susan Straight, author of Mecca and In the Country of Women
“I love and admire the way Lethem’s always pushing at the edges of the form. He’ so in command of the material, both of the subject and the language, that it sometimes feels as if he’s improvising on it, or even floating free of it completely, the way a jazz musician might. His wonderfully corrosive humor is underpinned by a strange, mixed sense of outrage and tenderness.” — Rupert Thomson, author of The Book of Revelation and Dartmouth Park
“Going back nearly three decades to his debut noir-influenced novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, Lethem has never approached the beat looking for just the facts. . . . Lethem unwinds his story through a series of small vignettes: imperfect Polaroids of an imperfect past that slowly coalesce into a photomosaic montage of memoir-meets-myth. . . . While Brooklyn Crime Novel may not cohere stylistically to the more hard-boiled Gotham underworld of an Ed McBain or Andrew Vachss novel, it’s by no means a chalk outline.” — BookPage