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Cover of Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything Is Illuminated

  • 288 pages ยท about 5 hours
  • First published 2002
  • 38 editions

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1 About this book

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, Jr. What they are looking for seems elusive - a truth hidden behind veils of time, language and the horrors of war. What they find turns all their worlds upside down..

Good for readers who want: humor and a coming-of-age story.

  • Humor
  • Coming of age
  • Bildungsromans
  • Grandfathers
  • Novelists
  • Jewish families
  • World War II
  • Young men

2 About Jonathan Safran Foer

Born 1977

Jonathan Safran Foer (; born February 21, 1977) is an American novelist. He is known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Here I Am (2016), and for his non-fiction works Eating Animals (2009) and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019). He teaches creative writing at New York University.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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