Product Description

The eagerly awaited new novel from the author of the ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’ and ‘Wonder Boys’. ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ is a heart-wrenching story of escape, love and comic-book heroes set in Prague, New York and the Arctic.

One night in 1939, Josef Kavalier shuffles into his cousin Sam Clay’s cramped New York bedroom, his arduous and nerve-wracking escape from Prague finally achieved – with the help of his mentor, the master illusionist Kornblum. But little does he realise that this uneasy first meeting is the start of an extraordinary friendship and even more fruitful business partnership.

For Sam, Joe’s formidable artistic skills are a chance to liberate them both from lives as inventory clerks at the Empire Novelties Incorporated Company. Together, they create a comic strip called ‘The Escapist’, its superhero a Nazi-busting saviour who liberates the oppressed around the world with his Golden Key. ‘The Escapist’ makes them their fortune and their name, but, as the situation worsens in Europe, Joe can only think of one thing. How can he effect a real-life escape, and free his family from the tyranny of Hitler?

Michael Chabon’s exceptional new novel is a thrilling tight-rope walk between high comedy and bitter tragedy, and confirms his position as one of the most inventive and daring of contemporary American writers. In Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, he has created two unforgettable characters bound together by love, family and cartoons. Their story, which ranges from the heady heights of the American Dream to the desperation and grief of World War II, and which journeys from New York and Czechoslovakia to the Arctic Circle, will live on in the mind of every reader long after the final page is turned.

Product Details

• Published on: 2005-01-03
• Formats: Abridged, Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 8
• Dimensions: 1.01" h x 6.78" w x 6.50" l, .68 pounds
• Binding: Audio CD

Amazon.co.uk Review
Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is both larger than life and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes and evil nemeses, even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages lurid with longing and hope. Samuel Klayman--self-described little man, city boy and Jew--first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship. In short order, Sam's talent for pulp plotting meets Joe's faultless, academy-trained line, and a comic-book superhero is born. A sort of lantern-jawed equaliser clad in dark blue long underwear, the Escapist "roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains". Before they know it, Kavalier and Clay (as Sam Klayman has come to be known) find themselves at the epicentre of comics' golden age.

Suffice to say, Michael Chabon writes novels like the Escapist busts locks. Previous books such as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys have prose of equal shimmer and wit, and yet here he seems to have finally found a canvas big enough for his gifts. The whole enterprise seems animated by love: for his alternately deluded, damaged and painfully sincere characters; for the quirks and curious innocence of tough-talking wartime New York; and, above all, for comics themselves, "the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred ageing boys dreaming as hard as they could". Far from negating such pleasures, the Holocaust's presence in the novel only makes them more pressing. Art, if not capable of actually fighting evil, can at least offer a gesture of defiance and hope--a way out of a world gone completely mad. --Mary Park, Amazon.com

Mail on Sunday Paperback review by Simon Shaw, 12th Aug 2001
'...makes the reader want to race through to the find out what happens, while at the same time wishing it will never end.'

Independent
'Dazzling. Chabon has not so much attempted the great American novel as brought to life the idea that it had already been written - week by week, in the humble heroism of the comic book.'