ABOUT
THE BOOK

A decade ago, The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era – and established Tom Wolfe as the prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. Now the master is back with a pitch-perfect coast-to-coast portrait of a wild and woolly, no- holds-barred, multifarious country on the cusp of the millennium. The setting is Atlanta, Georgia – a racially mixed, late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth and wily politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a College football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta conglomerate king whose outsize ego has at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 29,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife – and a half-empty office complex with a staggering load of debt. Meanwhile, Conrad Hensley, idealistic young father of two, is laid off from his job at the Croker Global Foods warehouse near Oakland and finds himself spiralling into the lower depths of the American legal system. And back in Atlanta, when star Georgia Tech running back Fareek “the Cannon” Fanon, a homegrown product of the city`s slums, is accused of date-raping the daughter of a pillar of the white establishment, upscale black lawyer Roger White II is asked to represent Fanon and help keep the city’s delicate racial balance from blowing sky-high. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real estate syndicates, the cast-off first wives of the corporate elite – Wolfe shows us contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him its most admired novelist.