Telegraph Avenue

From Michael Chabon, the bestselling author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; his first novel in 5 years is a lovingly painted pop-culture epic.

One street in Oakland, California. As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are hanging in there, co-regents of Brokeland Records. Their wives, Gwen and Aviva, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives.

When former star quarterback Gibson Goode announces plans to dump his latest Dogpile megastore on Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear the worst for their vulnerable little enterprise. As behind Goode's proposal a nefarious story lurks.

While their husbands struggle to mount a defence, Aviva and Gwen find themselves caught up in a professional battle that tests the limits of their friendship. And into their already tangled lives comes Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged.

An intimate epic set to the laidback beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all of its own, Telegraph Avenue is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet, and a must-read for fans of Nick Hornby’s ‘High Fidelity’.

Reviews

‘Telegraph Avenue is a wonderful novel … Wonderfully engaging, exuberantly written … the world constructed here is one to lose yourself in … This is a novel that I found myself slowing down while reading, out of sheer pleasure. I put it off, and rationed it out, and just didn’t want it to end.’ Philip Hensher, Spectator

‘Deeply wise and soulful … What you get is a big, serious, probing American novel, a page-turner that, like Chabon himself, seems to walk the line between high and low culture’ Attica Locke, Guardian

‘Telegraph Avenue achieves the blissed-out honey-coloured atmosphere of Cameron Crowe’s film ‘Almost Famous’ or Richard Linklater’s ‘Dazed and Confused’, but is deeper and more intelligent than either of those … It feels entirely relevant to the uncertainty of the present moment’ Sunday Times

‘An amazingly rich, emotionally detailed story … Mr. Chabon can write about just about anything … with a real, lived-in sense of empathy and passion.’ Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

‘Like a favourite old jazz LP, its richly pleasurable form beginning to end.’ Independent

‘A multi-generational, anatomy-of-a-community doorstopper with a plot like clockwork and sentences like toffee’ Sunday Telegraph

About the author

Michael Chabon is the author of two collections of short stories, ‘A Model World’ and ‘Werewolves in their Youth’, the novels ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’, ‘Wonder Boys’, ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’, ‘The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’ and ‘Telegraph Avenue’, and the non-fiction books ‘Maps and Legends and Manhood for Amateurs’. ‘Wonder Boys’ has been made into a film starring Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr. and ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’ won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, Esquire and Playboy. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and their four children.