Waxwings - Tapa dura

The author of Bad Land and other impressive novels has come up with an exciting new one which promises to be the first of a series of three books set in the Pacific North-West. The two main protagonists are Tom Janeway, a Hungarian-born Englishman living in Seattle with his wife Beth and son Finn, and an illegal alien known as Chick, who came over in a cargo container ship, and is desperate to pay the $37,000 he owes for his passage. Chick meets up with Tom, the distracted professor, who needs work done on his house, and soon things begin to go wrong for him. It is a brilliant story very well told.

In Seattle at the turn of the millennium, two hopeful new immigrants are drawn to Seattle by their own different versions of the American Dream. For Tom Janeway - a Hungarian-born Englishman most at home with books - it is the chance for family he thought he'd never have. For an illegal alien - Chick, as he comes to call himself not long after escaping a cargo container - it is a land of opportunity that is his for the taking. With the local economy in flux, mutual need soon brings enterprising Chick together with the distracted professor, and each man finds himself more dependent on the other than he could ever have expected. The people around them are also in flux, busily charting imaginary futures that are baffling and obscure to friends and family, or exclude them altogether, until Tom's life suddenly tailspins into American tragedy, or American farce. Moving from the sheetrock cubicles of an Internet start-up to fund-raising dinners in lakeside mansions, from brand-new condos in Belltown to the tents of the homeless, from businessmen's clubs to police stations and the creaking timber houses of Queen Anne Hill - Jonathan Raban recreates the intricate honeycomb of a boom-town in winter, of a nation on the verge.