Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives group the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging previous punk rocker and record professional, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha under no circumstances discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the top secret lives of a host of other heroes whose pathways intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as assorted as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

We first match Sasha in about A Visit in the Goon Squad her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in NEW YORK, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we find out the genesis of her turmoil when we discover her as the child of the violent marriage, after that being a runaway surviving in Naples, then as a scholar trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her closest friend. We plunge in to the concealed yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck within a lifeless marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from your city’s demimonde and encounters an epiphany of his personal while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We satisfy Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life-divorced, battling to connect with his nine-year-old kid, listening to a washed-up music group in the cellar of a suburban house-and after that revisit him in 1979, on the elevation of his youth, shy and sensitive, reveling in San Francisco’s punk picture as he discovers his ardor for stone and his present for spotting talent. We find out what became of his high school gang-who thrived and who faltered-and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, combined with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung intimate conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a publication about the interplay of your time and music, about success, about the stirrings and transformations place inexorably in movement by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. Within a breathtaking selection of designs and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that people all must either expert or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; as well as the general tendency to reach for both-and get away the merciless progress of time-in the transporting realms of artwork and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest authors.