The Arrest Audiobook By Jonathan Lethem cover art

The Arrest

A Novel

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The Arrest

By: Jonathan Lethem
Narrated by: Robert Fass
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About this listen

From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original post-collapse yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car.

The Arrest isn’t post-apocalypse. It isn’t a dystopia. It isn’t a utopia. It’s just what happens when much of what we take for granted—cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters—quits working. . . .

Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn’t hurt.

Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings’ life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza? Whatever he’s up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him.

Written with unrepentant joy and shot through with just the right amount of contemporary dread, The Arrest is speculative fiction at its absolute finest.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2020 Jonathan Lethem (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
Dystopian Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Transportation
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I liked this book, after a slow start. It was a strange twist on the post-apocalyptic genre, with unusual and likeable characters, a truly unpleasant antagonist, and an unexpected plot.

An Odd but Enjoyable Story

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This book is both about a future world and, as all good sci-fi, about where we are, have been, where we are going. The we here seems to be Americans, suffering a kind of inversion of the frontier as a futurist design with nostalgic glimmer heads back east. Ugh so good.

Metaphors are alive and hold the page

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A hilarious, Pynchon-esque, dystopian novel. Not for everyone, but an amazing and allegorical take for those interested.

Wonderful

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in a world where technology ceases to exist, a lost remain of the previous world comes to haunt a local community. especially resounding where listening to this in times of lockdown

intriguing post apocalyptic

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Very surprised at how good this was. Very different from your average post apocalyptic tale. While not as good as my favorite work from Lethem, which is The Feral Detective, its still very interesting with a good narrator. It seemed boring at the beginning. But , it certainly is not.
4.26 stars

4.26 stars

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What do you get when you mix post-apocalyptic organic farm with failed/confused screenwriter? The Arrest.

Californian new aged nonsense

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Lethem drives his story to the tip of the country and finally over its edge in this slow burn toward madness.

Excellent world building.

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This was my third Jonathan Lethem novel. I loved Motherless Brooklyn and Gun, With Occasional Music but I cannot recommend The Arrest. If it hadn't of been a 7.5 hour book, I never would have finished it. None of the main characters were likable (especially the protagonist) and the only character that was interesting was the antagonist.

Disappointed

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Another Lethem novel to wrap around your brain. He doesn’t hurry, he doesn’t waste words either. An “End of the World” with all the characters that are sure to be there. Those you love and those you hate. A book to hear again after it has had time to percolate and settle in your brain.

How to describe a Lethem novel?

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What a shame that Jonathan Lethem wasted his talent on this vacuous, shallow story. There are no characters to identify with and very little in the way of a story to drive the narrative forward. There are plenty of clever lines spoken by Todbaum, but they add up to nothing more than cleverness for the sake of cleverness. A waste of 7 and a half hours. I kept listening to the very end in the hope that the ending would redeem the book. Nope.

A Real Stinker

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