The Yiddish Policemen's Union

According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with a crude hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy. But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead. A detective has enough murder on his hands, without the body turning up on his own doorstep. What if, as Franklin Roosevelt once proposed, Alaska - and not Israel - had become the homeland for the Jews after the Second World War? In Michael Chabon's Yiddish-speaking 'Alyeska', Orthodox gangs in side-curls and knee breeches roam the streets of Sitka, where Detective Meyer Landsman discovers the corpse of a heroin-addled chess prodigy in the flophouse Meyer calls home. Marionette strings stretch back to the hands of charismatic Rebbe Gold, leader of a sect that seems to have drawn its mission statement from the Cosa Nostra. Meyer is determined to unsnarl the meaning behind the murder. Even if that means surrendering his badge and his dignity to the chief of Sitka's homicide unit - his fearsome ex-wife Bina. A novel of colossal ambition and heart, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union interweaves a homage to the stylish menace of 1940s film noir with a bittersweet fable of identity, home and faith. ‘A brilliantly written fantasy’ – The Guardian Michael Chabon has long been a favourite of Waterstones’ with his tour-de-force novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay never lacking an ardent bookseller review. A Pulitzer Prize-winner with a seemingly endless capacity for creative invention and reinvention Chabon’s novels refuse to be pigeon-holed with his successes including variously the alternate history The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a headlong caper about writing and scholarship, The Wonder Boys, a reworking of a classic detective novel in The Final Solution and his own take on the long realist novel, Telegraph Avenue.