At the turn of the millennium, two immigrants are drawn to the United States by their own versions of the American Dream. For Tom Janeway - a Hungarian-born English intellectual most at home with his books - it's the family he thought he'd never have. For Chick - an illegal alien newly escaped from a cargo container - it's the land of plenty he imagined back in China. But as the stock market hits a new high, anti-globalist riots break out in the streets, a terrorist is arrested and a child disappears, the two men's dreams collide in a way neither could have anticipated. Unjustly accused of a horrific crime, estranged from his wife and his beloved young son, Tom's life is rapidly unravelling. Chick, meanwhile, has a burgeoning business by day but no safe place to lay his bed at night. For both, the New World proves surprisingly full of old ways. Waxwings is a masterwork. Exquisitely written, moving, funny and hugely entertaining, it brilliantly captures the landscape and life of contemporary America, and it confirms Jonathan Raban as one of our very finest writers.
Industry Reviews
"A tour de force. . . . In its comedy and melancholy appreciation of the human predicament in the new millenium, this novel goes a long way toward making it bearable." --"The Washington Post Book World
""A generous, affirming novel. . . . Terrific." "--The New York Times Book Review"
"A keenly observant, ironic, yet at heart sympathetic exploration of what America has promised and provided." --"Chicago Tribune
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"[D]exterously tacks between tragedy and comedy. [Raban's] representations of materialism and the dot.com working environment are dead-on, and his descriptions of the hopes and fears of parents and spouses are heart-rending." --"St. Louis Post Dispatch
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"Stylishly smooth, descriptively compelling and tragically funny. . . . This is Seattle as Dickens might describe it." --"The Seattle Times"
""Waxwings" . . . is hugely satisfying; buzzing with life from Seattle's dotcom industry, sharpened by domestic intrigue and then alarm as the protagonist's life begins to fall apart." --"Independent on Sunday"
"The best novel yet about the dot-com era. . . . Raban's snapshots . . . are fall-over funny. [He] nails our short-lived intoxication and hints at the hangover to follow." --"Time Out NewYork"
"Raban's pages . . . sing with dazzling phrases and fresh insights." --"Seattle Post-Intelligencer"
"Sharper (and a lot faster) than The Bonfire of the Vanities, [Waxwings] may well be one of the best accounts ever written of an American era." --"Kirkus Reviews" (starred)
"It's a testament to Raban's control that he can integrate personal and public catastrophes so deftly in this witty novel. . . . He prods us to consider that we're living in a periodthat makes us all somehow foreigners." --"Christian Science Monitor
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"Raban's views, ironic and humane, are always acute; always illuminating. His prose - agile, musky, particular - is a treasure." --"The Guardian "(London)
"Marvelous. . . . As with [Tom] Wolfe's extravaganzas, Waxwings teems with juicy, funny characters emblematic of their time and place . . . but, unlike Wolfe, Raban knows how to bridge the gap between the broad social canvas of satire and the interior life of delicate rounded characters." --"Entertainment Weekly
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"Waxwings has great amplitude and intelligence . . . a wide-ranging, pungent, sharply observed novel." --"Raleigh News Observer
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"A delicious social comedy . . . "Waxwings "is also an elegant meditation on immigrant America." --"The" "Boston Globe
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"Generous, funny and beautifully written . . . Waxwings is extraordinarily rich and expertly paced and arranged. The social range of the novel is enormous; the characterizations acute. Every character, however incidental, has a voice." --"The" "Columbus Dispatch
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"Raban's specialty is the sly, unsparing metaphor and jarring observation, and he's at the top of his form in Waxwings. Yet he perceives his adopted homeland without American Beauty-style snarkiness or intellectual dispassion a la DeLillo, displaying instead the compassion and bracing honesty of an ambivalent lover." --"Village Voice Literary Supplement
""Waxwings" "stimulates the reader both emotionally and intellectually, gently tapping at the funny bone while giving us characters we care about. . . . It is a solid example of contemporary literature: entertainment with a message about modern society and themodern individual." --"The Orlando Sun-Sentinel
""Imagine Evelyn Waugh with a social conscience and, perhaps, a tad more humanity. . . . Enormously pleasing. . . . Wonderful fun, as lively as anything out there." --"The Hartford Courant
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