Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Michael Chabon is the author of two collections of short stories, ‘A Model World’ and ‘Werewolves in their Youth’, the novels ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’, ‘Wonder Boys’, ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’, ‘The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’ and ‘Telegraph Avenue’, and the non-fiction books ‘Maps and Legends and Manhood for Amateurs’. ‘Wonder Boys’ has been made into a film starring Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr. and ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’ won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, Esquire and Playboy. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and their four children.

'His almost ecstatically smart and sassy new novel...Chabon is a spectacular writer...[and] is a language magician, turning everything into something else just for the delight of playing tricks with words...Chabon's ornate prose makes [Raymond] Chandler's fruity observations of the world look quite plain...He writes like a dream and has you laughing out loud, applauding the fun he has with language and the way he takes the task of a writer and runs delighted rings around it.' Guardian 'He is the most wonderful vaudeville performer.' Philip Hensher, in the Spectator 'Books of the Year' 'Michael Chabon's brilliant new novel starts with a bang...It hums with humour. It buzzes with gags...Superb images also team in this long novel: the accumulated reading experience is one of admiration, close to awe, at the vigour of Chabon's imagination...a hilarious, antic whirl of a novel.' Sunday Times 'A divine gumshoe romp.' Sam Leith, in the Spectator 'Books of the Year' 'Chabon has written such a dazzling, individual, hyperconfident novel that it's tough to work out who wouldn't have fun reading it. If the thriller plot doesn't get you (and it's easily the equal of any detective story in the past five years) then the exuberant style and the sackfuls of great jokes will... Whichever way you cut it, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is pure narrative pleasure, high-class stuff from cover to cover. Only a shmendrik would pass it up.' Independent on Sunday 'What really impresses about Chabon's eighth book is the author's ability to take a far-off, unfamiliar landscape and make it so densely, vividly imagined that 50 pages in the reader feels like they've know it forever.' Daily Mail 'A marvellous, masterly reinvigoration of the detective genre.' Daily Telegraph