In Seattle at the turn of the millennium, two hopeful new immigrants are drawn to Seattle by their own different versions of the American Dream. For Tom Janeway - a Hungarian-born Englishman most at home with books - it is the chance for family he thought he'd never have. For an illegal alien - Chick, as he comes to call himself not long after escaping a cargo container - it is a land of opportunity that is his for the taking. With the local economy in flux, mutual need soon brings enterprising Chick together with the distracted professor, and each man finds himself more dependent on the other than he could ever have expected. The people around them are also in flux, busily charting imaginary futures that are baffling and obscure to friends and family, or exclude them altogether, until Tom's life suddenly tailspins into American tragedy, or American farce. Moving from the sheetrock cubicles of an Internet start-up to fund-raising dinners in lakeside mansions, from brand-new condos in Belltown to the tents of the homeless, from businessmen's clubs to police stations and the creaking timber houses of Queen Anne Hill - Jonathan Raban recreates the intricate honeycomb of a boom-town in winter, of a nation on the verge.

Author Biography

Jonathan Raban is the author of over a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Passage to Juneau, Bad Land, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Coasting, Old Glory, Arabia, Soft City, Waxwings and Surveillance. His awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and the Governor's Award of the State of Washington. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, Outside, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The London Review of Books, and other magazines. In 1990 Raban, a British citizen, moved from London to Seattle, where he now lives with his daughter.