a city reader

The Early Favorite

The Street Sweeper is my first best book of this new year

I’m only 100 pages into this novel, but I can tell, could tell by page 5 actually, that it’s got me and is worth telling you about. I danced around but never bought Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity while knowing from reviews and the look of the book that I should. We’ve all got books like that that we let get by us. This new one I jumped on right away.

His style is very easy and makes you calmly turn the page to see where it all might be going. His exact observations of the everyday stuff of New York City life are worth the cover price themselves. But the story, which intertwines the Civil Rights movement with a felon and a father and son and the Holocaust, is like nothing you’ve read about all that before. High praise.