Everything Is Illuminated

A young American named Jonathan travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis during the Second World War. His guide is a young Ukrainian named Alex, whose English is charmingly, gloriously wrong. What they find — and fail to find — becomes the occasion for one of the most formally inventive and emotionally overwhelming novels of the early twenty-first century.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated operates on two levels simultaneously: Alex’s comic account of the present-day journey, and Jonathan’s imagined history of the destroyed Jewish shtetl of Trachimbrod — a history built from fragments, myth, and the urgent need to know something that cannot be fully known. The two narratives circle each other, their tones completely different and yet each illuminating the other, until they converge on a truth that neither voice could have reached alone.

This is a novel about the Holocaust that refuses both piety and despair. It is funny and devastating and formally brilliant — a debut that announced one of the most important voices in contemporary American fiction. One of the great novels of the twenty-first century, so far. Published by Penguin.