Amazon Best of the Month, October 2009: Jonathan Lethem, the home-grown frontrunner of a generation of Brooklyn writers, crosses the bridge to Manhattan in Chronic City, a smart, unsettling, and meticulously hilarious novel of friendship and real estate among the rich and the rent-controlled. Lethem's story centers around two unlikely friends, Chase Insteadman, a genial nonentity who was once a child sitcom star and now is best known as the loyal fianc� of a space-stranded astronaut, and Perkus Tooth, a skinny, moody, underemployed cultural critic. Chase and Perkus are free-floating, dope-dependent bohemians in a borough built on ambition, living on its margins but with surprising access to its centers of power, even to the city's billionaire mayor. Paranoiac Perkus sees urgent plots everywhere--in the font of The New Yorker, in an old VHS copy of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid--but Chronic City, despite the presence of death, politics, and a mysterious, marauding tiger, is itself light on plot. Eschewing dramatic staples like romance and artistic creation for the more meandering passions of friendship and observation, Chronic City thrives instead on the brilliance of Lethem's ear and eye. Every page is a pleasure of pitch-perfect banter and spot-on cultural satire, cut sharply with the melancholic sense that being able to explain your city doesn't make you any more capable of living in it. --Tom Nissley

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Had We But Known? has a stock of around 7000 books with two main specialisms of Mystery novels from the ?Golden Age of Detection? (or GAD as it is sometimes called) and History, particularly Scottish and Medieval History. We also have a large selection of Scottish literature. In addition to these we have good smaller collections of Science Fiction, pulp paperbacks, Chess and European Literature in translation. We issue occasional catalogue of Golden Age Mysteries and Scottish Literature and History

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HAO2.EU LIMITED
100 High Street, Whitstable, CT5 1AZ, United Kingdom

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Payment in advance but all items are sent on approva as per ABEbooks policies

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All books are first UK hardback editions unless stated. Dustjackets where noted. If a dustjacket is price-clipped or there is an ownership inscription I will endeavour to list it.

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Postal rates are based on an ordinary hardback of under 500 grammes in weight. Overseas orders are always sent by Royal mail. I will advise of rates in advance or you can ask me for a quote. Please note heavy items are very expemnsive to send outside from UK to outside Europe so it is usually only worthwhile for more expensive or rare items. Always ask in advance if possible

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