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Motherless Brooklyn

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Motherless Brooklyn

By: Jonathan Lethem
Narrated by: Frank Muller
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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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It took some time to appreciate the narrator, but it generally does, and he's actually really good.
I came to this via The Goldfinch and the Once Upon a Time at Bennington College podcast and I'm so glad I found it.

I really enjoyed this

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This is a really fantastic story, incredibly written, but the narrator absolutely hits it out of the park. I can’t stop listening to it and I will probably listen to it again.

Phenomenal performance

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