“[An] intricately excavated, breathtaking tale of imperiled childhood in a fitfully gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. . . . With Brooklyn as a microcosm of human folly and strife, Lethem’s virtuoso, many-faceted novel is trenchant, hilarious, wrenching, and tender.”
—BOOKLIST (starred) 

‘If Dean Street could talk, Brooklyn Crime Novel would be its voice, and it would serve up a half-century of Brooklyn’s dirt—fractured multicultural dreams, waves of gentrification, ‘black mayonnaise’—while confessing its many crimes, from shoplifted magazines to blockbusting to murder. An intricate, spellbinding tour of the soul of Brooklyn as it casts off Manhattan’s shadow.’
—JAMES HANNAHAM

“A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins the whole together: is the crime ‘time’? Or the almighty dollar? I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this.”
—COLUM MCCANN

“Brooklyn Crime Novel isn’t what it says it is. In fact, it takes apart the three words of its title, even as it takes each of them very seriously. It loosens the knot that is Brooklyn, city of tangled streets, lost oases, and false fronts. It interrogates what a Crime is—a dance? an exchange? a deal gone wrong? a funny mugging? And it opens up what a Novel can be. This is no soul-affirming flight; no apotheosis of ‘where I’m from’; no prettified, gentrified tale of trauma; nor is it a winky metafictional gambit; nor a self-important autofictional one. Brooklyn Crime Novel is an inquiry and a tragedy, and as with the oldest crime story ever written, Oedipus Rex, the judge, detective, victim, and accused are one and the same. A deeply moving, fiercely intelligent, and acerbically funny novel about the scandal and disaster of American capital in our time.”
—NAMWALI SERPELL 

“Tracking the slippery, overlapping paths of gentrification and crime are a vast cast of characters for whom time and space bend and retract in this expansive novel.”
—BOSTON GLOBE

“Jonathan Lethem creates a vivid portrait of the borough of Brooklyn over 50 years of profound social and economic change. . . . Anyone attuned by personal experience to the vibrancy and edginess of New York City life, or who simply enjoys reading about it, will find something to savor here.”
—SHELF AWARENESS

“The latest novel from the bard of Brooklyn is a metafictional collage that tells the story of some fifty years in one neighborhood…It’s funny and wise and weird…[a] love letter to Brooklyn.”
—LITHUB

“A wild, exuberant ambition that pays off and delivers to readers a true achievement: a book at once full of art and grace and mystery…Lethem proves again why he is a master of the form.”
—CRIMEREADS