Telegraph Avenue

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there'longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeleyand Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart'half tavern, half temple'stands Brokeland. When ex?NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announcesplans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat andArchy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life. An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarchset to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnicalstyle all its own, Telegraph Avenueis the great American novel we've been waiting for.Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet.