Waxwings - Tapa blanda

The first of a proposed series of three novels set in the Pacific North-WestAn unsettling, always surprising, funny, and moving novel of manners, money, and morals, Waxwings is set in Seattle at the turn of the millennium, when the high-tech Gold Rush threatens to overwhelm the actual world with its myriad virtual alternatives. In a city where everyone appears to come from somewhere else, and where anyone holding stock options expects to become someone else, the conflicting desires of everyday life are exaggerated beyond reckoning.Two hopeful new immigrants are drawn to Seattle by more traditional versions of the American Dream. For Tom Janeway - a Hungarian-born Englishman most at home with books - it is the 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 the land of opportunity he'd imagined back in Fujian province. Waxwings is a story about two men, each searching for a place they can call their own, a space where they can be themselves.

Jonathan Raban is the author of over a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Passage to Juneau, Bad Land, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Coasting, Old Glory, Arabia, Soft City, Waxwings and Surveillance. His awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and the Governor's Award of the State of Washington. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, Outside, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The London Review of Books, and other magazines. In 1990 Raban, a British citizen, moved from London to Seattle, where he now lives with his daughter.