Book description
Brilliant brothers Langley and Homer Collyer are born into bourgeois
New York comfort in settled times, their home a fin-de-siècle mansion on
upper Fifth Avenue, their future rosy. But before he is out of his teens
Homer begins to lose his sight, Langley returns from the War in Europe
with his lungs seared by gas, and when the death of their parents in the
influenza epidemic of 1918 leaves the brothers orphaned, they seem
perilously ill-equipped to deal with the new era. Around Central Park
carriages give way to motor cars, Prohibition to free love, but Homer
and Langley adapt: their townhouse fills and empties and fills again,
with servants, lodgers, tea-dancers and gangsters. They are mocked and
spied on, embraced by hippies and besieged by bailiffs, but as the world
turns ever more incomprehensible Homer and Langley hold fast to their
principles of self-reliance, courage, kindness and love, and they
endure. E. L. Doctorow is one of America's most accomplished and
acclaimed living writers. Winner of (among others) the National Book
Award, he is the author of ten novels that have explored the drama of
American life from the late 19th century to the 21st.
