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Motherless Brooklyn

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About this listen

Now a major motion picture from Warner Bros, starring Bruce Willis, Edward Norton and Willem Dafoe.

From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel.

Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count and rip apart language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable.

When Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly turned upside down, and this outcast who has trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case, while trying to keep the words straight in his head.

A compulsively involving and totally captivating homage to the classic detective tale.

©2001 Jonathan Lethem (P)2021 W F Howes Crime Fiction Detective Modern Detectives Mystery Private Investigators Fiction Crime Suspense
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Loved the story, but the reader has an annoying habit of delivering each sentence with a private detective-style inflection, and draws out the last word of each sentence in the same way every time.

Great book, lousy reading

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Honestly the reviews on here slamming the Brooklyn noir narration aren't fair. That's what the sample button's for, to try before you buy. For me, the narrator's Sin City esque Brooklyn drawl is part of the charm and adds to a brilliant book. But the best thing about it is the language. The word play and ticks of our tourettes syndrome suffering protagonist is like nothing I've heard before. And a stylistic, poignant and hilarious joy to boot.

This is great, and the narration makes it so

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The way this is read is so distracting you can’t actually concentrate on the story.

What a disappointment

Had to stop after a chapter because of the narrator

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