Winner of the Galaxy International Author of the Year Award 2011.

Jennifer Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an ageing former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. This is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2011. Featured on The TV Book Club on More4 on 10 Jul 2011.

Comparison: Annie Proulx, Louise Welsh, Barbara Trapido
For more see our Author 'Like for Like' recommendation system
 

Synopsis

Bennie Salazar is an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her longstanding compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend.

We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life - divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed up band in the basement of a suburban house - and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco's punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang - who thrived and who faltered - and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie's catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou's far flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to Powerpoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both - and escape the merciless progress of time - in the transporting realms of art and music.

Reviews

'Jennifer Egan is a rare bird: an experimental writer with a deep commitment to character, whose fiction is at once intellectually stimulating and moving. . . . It's a tricky book, but in the best way. When I got to the end, I wanted to start from the top again immediately, both to revisit the characters and to understand better how the pieces fit together. Like a masterful album, this one demands a replay.' - The San Francisco Chronicle

'Thriftily evokes many disparate American lives in less than 300 pages, vividly showing how the virtues of the realist tradition - historical depth and strong point of view - can be combined with a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and dissolution.' - Pankaj Mishra, Guardian

'Exhilirating...arresting...brilliant. Turn up the music...and curl up with The Goon Squad.' - Washington Post

'Beautifully constructed.' - Independent

'Egan writes with a hipster's talent for laconic understatement.' – Metro

'Contains some of the fizziest prose of the year.' - Telegraph.co.uk

'Audacious, surprisingly affecting novel.' - New Statesman

'Surreal, moving and funny.' – Grazia

'Egan's precise, calm, underwater prose is a persistent pleasure.' - Daily Telegraph

'As emotionally accurate as it is architecturally adventurous.' - Independent on Sunday

'A blend of insight, wit and economy.' – Metro

'A delight.' – Observer

'Sparkling.' - Guardian

'A must-read. Irresistible. Fiction of the highest quality.' - The Sunday Times

About the Author

Jennifer Egan is the author of The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2011. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.   Author photo © Pieter Van Hattem More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation