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From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel. Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable.

Cheryl Foggo came of age during the 1960s in Calgary, a time when a Black family walking down the street still drew stares from everyone they passed. During her childhood, a community of extended family and friends, with roots in the Black migration of 1910 across the western provinces, worked together to provide intervals of respite from racism. But as an adolescent, Cheryl struggled to understand the negative attitudes towards blackness she and her family encountered, and how she was made to feel an outsider in the only place she ever knew as home.