Motherless Brooklyn is a noir detective novel with Tourettic impulses, while The Fortress of Solitude is a vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in Brooklyn in the 1970s. Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheroes, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory.

Format: Hardback
Length: 848 pages
Publication date: 25 July 2024
Publisher: Everyman

Motherless Brooklyn

Motherless Brooklyn is a compulsively readable riff on the classic noir detective novel. Set in Brooklyn, Lionel Essrog is an orphan with Tourettic impulses who works for a limo service cum detective agency. When Frank Minna, the agency's owner, is fatally stabbed, Lionel must untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. The Fortress of Solitude is the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighbourhood where the entertainments include muggings and games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unravelling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheroes, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. From the prize-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude is a daring, riotous, sweeping novel that spins the tale of two friends and their adventures in late 20th-century America.

Weight: 862g
Dimension: 210 x 135 x 45 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781841594309