Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0099459167, Paperback)

The masterpiece that Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, hailed as 'one of the literary must-reads of the summer' and that the Independent in London likened to 'Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions meeting Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections' is now available in paperback. THE HALF BROTHER is a truly gripping, epic novel, hugely ambitious in scope and utterly compelling, a wonderful mixture of surreal comedy and touching intimacy. In stunning detail and elegant prose, it relates the lives of four generations of a far from ordinary family. It opens on May 8, 1945, when 20-year-old Vera, hoping to celebrate the end of World War II with her mother and grandmother, is brutally raped by an unknown assailant. From that crime is born a boy named Fred, a misfit who later becomes a boxer. Barnum, Vera's other son born several years later, and Fred form a bizarre but special relationship. 'I should have been your father,' Fred tells Barnum, 'instead of the fool who says he is.' Spanning 50 years, filled with a wonderful galaxy of finely etched characters, and structurally brilliant, THE HALF BROTHER has been both a literary sensation and a bestseller wherever it has been published.