“A rambunctious tour de force of inventive and intelligent storytelling. Read, you can feel the life beating.” - Philadelphia Inquirer Foer can place his reader’s hand on the heart of human experience, the transcendent beauty of human connections. Read it, and you'll feel altered, chastened-seared in the fire of something new.” - Washington Post “Imagine a novel as verbally cunning as A Clockwork Orange, as harrowing as The Painted Bird, as exuberant and twee as Candide, and you have Everything Is Illuminated. As his search moves back in time, the fantastical history moves forward, until reality collides with fiction in a heart-stopping scene of extraordinary power.

With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man-also named Jonathan Safran Foer-sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis.Īccompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.Īs their adventure unfolds, Jonathan imagines the history of his grandfather’s village, conjuring a magical fable of startling symmetries that unite generations across time. Jonathan Safran Foer's debut-'a funny, eply felt novel about the dangers of confronting the past and the redemption that comes with laughing at it, even when that seems all but impossible.' ( Time)

Safran foer everything is illuminated