The Sellout
This won all sorts of prizes when it came out, including the Man Booker. <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> called it, "Swiftian satire of the highest order . . . Giddy, scathing and dazzling." From the publisher: "The narrator, raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable."
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From the publisher: "Paul Beatty's hilarious and scathing debut novel is about Gunnar Kaufman, an awkward, black surfer bum who is moved by his mother from Santa Monica to urban West Los Angeles. There, he begins to undergo a startling transformation from neighborhood outcast to basketball superstar, and eventually to reluctant messiah of a 'divided, downtrodden people.'"
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