A decade after the publication of "Haussmann", or "the Distinction", his acclaimed novel about nineteenth-century Paris, Paul La Farge turns his imagination to America at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In September 2000, a young programmer comes home from a festival in the Nevada desert and learns that his grandfather has died, and that he has to return to Thebes, a town which is so isolated that its inhabitants have their own language, in order to clean out the house where his family lived for five generations. While he's there, he runs into Yesim, a Turkish American woman whom he loved as a child, and begins a romance in which past and present are dangerously confused. At the same time, he remembers San Francisco in the wild years of the Internet boom, and mourns the loss of Swan, a madman who may have been the only person to understand what was happening to the city, and to the world.
- ISBN10 1410446239
- ISBN13 9781410446237
- Publish Date 7 March 2012 (first published 27 September 2011)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 2 August 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Thorndike Press
- Edition Large type / large print edition
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 385
- Language English