These Dreams of You

Book excerpt: “Set against the backdrop of Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency . . . A complex and imaginative literary tapestry about family and identity” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). At once immediate and epic, funny and devastating, this new novel by the author of Shadowbahn is a transcendent dispatch from the intersection of art and politics, passion and memory. One November night in a canyon outside Los Angeles, Zan Nordhoc—a failed novelist turned pirate radio DJ—sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country’s first black president, Barack Obama. In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession threatening their home, Zan, his wife, and their son set out to solve the enigma of the little girl’s life. When they find themselves scattered and strewn across two continents, a mysterious stranger with a secret appears, who sends the story spiraling forty years into the past. Sweeping from 1960s London and ’70s Berlin to twenty-first-century California, and the beginning-of-civilization Ethiopia, These Dreams of You chronicles not only a family struggling to salvage its bonds but a twelve-year-old boy readying himself for what the years to come hold. “Truly electrifying. In its gorgeous, vivid prose and its acutely sensitive soul, These Dreams of You shows us just what a novel can still do in our own crazy times.” —The Boston Globe “Drama filled with exuberance.” —The Washington Post “The four Nordhocs who provide the messy, vibrant heart of These Dreams of You make up a representative tableau for the new millennium: the American family as mash-up.” —The New York Times Book Review