A Visit from the Goon Squad

Shortlisted for the IMPAC prize

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Winner of the International Author of the Year at the Galaxy National Book Awards 2011

Longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding work circles Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs.

Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, but the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other people whose paths intersect with theirs in the San Francisco 1970s music scene, the demimonde of Naples, New York at many points along the way from the pre-Internet nineties to a postwar future, and on a catastrophic safari into the heart of Africa.

We meet Lou, Bennie’s charismatic, careless mentor; Scotty, the young musician who slipped off the grid; the uncle facing a failed marriage who goes in search of seventeen-year-old Sasha when she disappears into Italy; and the therapist on whose couch she dissects darker compulsions.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about time, survival, and the electrifying sparks ignited at the seams of our lives by colliding destinies. Sly, surprising, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is to be adapted into a TV series by HBO.