Motherless Brooklyn
From Amazon: Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our 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 Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow skips town. Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, 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.
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Lionel Essrog, an orphan with Tourette's working for a small-time Brooklyn detective agency, is on the curb the night his boss is killed. He spends the rest of the novel chasing the case and his own tics.
Yes. Motherless Brooklyn won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel. It cemented Jonathan Lethem's reputation as a literary genre-bender.
Yes. Edward Norton wrote, directed, and starred in a 2019 film adaptation. The film changes the time period from the 1990s to 1957, which Lethem has said he supports as a creative choice.
Motherless Brooklyn was written by Jonathan Lethem, published in 1999 by Faber.
Motherless Brooklyn is 316 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Motherless Brooklyn takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Motherless Brooklyn is a standalone novel by Jonathan Lethem, not part of a series.
Motherless Brooklyn is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
