Everything Is Illuminated

This is the story of a young man who visits the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. In turns hilarious and harrowing, lit with a manic energy, it is narrated in part by a Ukranian translator, who has a murderous approach to the English language, and in part by the young man, who reanimates the lives of his grandfather and ancestors. Eventually the past meets the present, as fiction collides with reality in an unforgettable climax.

With breathtaking inventiveness and narrative control, Jonathan Safran Foer has written a book about searching - for people and places that no longer exist, for a lost history - that reaches heights of comic mayhem and heartrending tragedy in equal measure.