The Feral Detective

'A nimble and uncanny performance, brimming with Lethem's trademark verve and wit' Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad





Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She's looking for her friend's missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist - a laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer - to help. The unlikely pair navigate the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and find that Arabella is in serious trouble - caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end. Phoebe's trip to the desert was always going to be strange, but it was never supposed to be dangerous...





Jonathan Lethem's first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, The Feral Detective is a singular achievement by one of our greatest writers.



Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.



The Feral Detective investigates our haunted America in all its contemporary guises - at the edge of the city, beyond the blank desert, in the apartment next door.It's a nimble and uncanny performance, brimming with Lethem's trademark verve and wit.



A rollicking detective story... The Feral Detective is the rare novel that feels like it's being typed onto the page as fast as you can read it.



The Feral Detective is one of his nimblest novels, a plucky voyage into the traumatized soul of the Trump era... It's a pleasure to see a smart writer having so much grisly fun.



A highbrow mystery... Fans of Motherless Brooklyn take note



One of America's finest living writers - wry, truthful and utterly original ... Startling, funny - it is captivating.



Lethem is a fearless kind of writer



Packed with unusual characters, it is captivating.



A sort of psychedelic detective story... The crackling wit is there from the outset... Almost every page has a zinger.



Wild, urgent, and very funny. As always, Lethem writes knowingly and brilliantly about weird, off-the-grid, wayward America. In his ever-more-electric prose, he illuminates both the barbarity and the beauty.



Like The Crying of Lot 49 as written and directed by Elaine May, The FeralDetective is hilarious and terrifying and wrenching. Phoebe is one of the grandest, funniest heroes I've come upon in a long time.



Acerbically funny, consistently twisted, truly original.



Lethem, a master of the genre-bending detective novel and eccentric characters, offers both in this exploration of Trump's America.



I want to read a shelf of Heist. I want to make him my new Travis McGee, and that's, seriously, the highest praise I know.



I read it with great pleasure - it's terrific stuff, and deserves lots of readers. Lethem has the gift to make serious things fun.



A funny but rage-fueled stunner. Utterly unique and absolutely worthwhile.



Surrealistic, genre-bending...hallucinatory. A haunting tour of the gulf between the privileged and the dispossessed.



A bizarre, poignant, mind-bending journey... worth every page.