The winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction from the author of ‘Wonder Boys’. ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & 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 nerve-racking escape from Prague finally achieved. Little does he realise that this is the beginning of an extraordinary friendship and even more fruitful business partnership. Together, they create a comic strip called ‘The Escapist’, its superhero a Nazi-busting saviour who liberates the oppressed around the world. ‘The Escapist’ makes their fortune, but Joe can think of only one thing: how can he effect a real-life escape, and free his family from the tyranny of Hitler?
Michael Chabon’s exceptional 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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 656
Imprint: Fourth Estate UK
Publication date: 23/05/2024
Series: Collins Modern Classics
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
By Michael Chabon
Review by Renata
Chabon's epic adventure has all the Zap! Pow! energy of the golden age comic books created by the titular dynamic duo. Through the lives of Jewish cousins Josef Kavalier and Sam Clay - one an escapee from the Nazi threat in Europe, the other a second-generation Brooklyn immigrant - Chabon evokes the displacement and loss that both drives and haunts the Jewish diaspora in America. His writing is playful and virtuosic but the impulse to tell a great story is always in the driver's seat - and pressing a foot to the accelerator! This Pulitzer Prize winner is a frequent entry on "Best Ever Books" lists and it's certainly on mine.
