Jailbird

Walter F. Starbuck went to Harvard on a scholarship from a powerful industrialist, became a minor functionary in the Nixon White House, and ended up in prison for his tangential involvement in Watergate. Released on the novel’s first page, he finds himself — through a series of improbable events — connected to the most powerful corporation in America. Vonnegut uses his bewildered, decent, slightly hapless narrator to tell the whole story of the American twentieth century.

Jailbird is one of Vonnegut’s most politically engaged novels, and arguably his most underrated. It draws on the real history of American labour movements — the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the Cuyahoga massacre, the slow betrayal of the working class by the people who claimed to speak for it — and asks what it means to have lived through all of that with your conscience more or less intact. The answer is both funny and heartbreaking.

For readers who love Vonnegut’s more famous novels and want to go deeper — this is essential. For readers new to him — this is an ideal starting point. Published by Vintage.