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Lamont Williams is a paroled felon looking to turn his life around, working as a street sweeper at a large city hospital and searching for his estranged daughter. Adam Zignelik is a struggling, nontenured professor, paralyzed by looming failure, his life falling apart around him. He discovers a cache of recordings of previously unheard voices reaching out from a horrific past, voices that can both save his career and bring him back to the woman he loves. At the same time, Lamont forges an unlikely friendship with a dying man, who, having lived through those horrors, has a crucially important story to tell and to preserve. The worlds surrounding these two men, their families, their pasts, their potential futures, swirl in and out of history as the forces of the Holocaust, the American civil rights movement, Chicago unions, and New York City racial politics combine in a thrilling cross-generational literary symphony.
The acclaimed author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Elliot Perlman weaves the narratives of Lamont and Adam - and their myriad connected friends, lovers, and families - into an ambitious, masterful depiction of the power that memory has over our lives.
"Starred Review. [R]elated characters weave in and out, the coincidences of their intersections fraught with tantalizing meaning. Perlman deftly navigates these complicated waters, moving back and forth in time without having to take narrative responsibility for the course of history." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Perlman's compulsively readable wrestle-with-evil saga is intimate and monumental, wrenching and cathartic." - Booklist
"Australian writer Perlman has been on my radar since his multivalenced Seven Types of Ambiguity; his latest will be sought out by serious readers everywhere." - Library Journal
"The characters live with you long after you have finished the novel and the end is so clever, highlighting Elliot's standing as an extremely talented Australian writer." - ABC Local (Australia)
"This is one of those rare novels a person reads in their lifetime that is likely to live in their mind forever." - Cairns (Australia)
"This is the kind of book that I would imagine must have been terribly difficult to bring off and yet Perlman has done just that: an amazing accomplishment." - Timeless Books (Australia)
This information about The Street Sweeper was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Elliot Perlman is the author of The Reasons I Won't Be Coming and Seven Types of Ambiguity. He also cowrote the award-winning screenplay for a film version of Three Dollars, his first novel. He lives in Australia.
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