The Street Sweeper - Softcover

`Excellent ... Harrowing, humane and brilliant.' --The Times

`The interleaved sequences set in Nazi Germany and Fifties America are so searingly potent ... It demonstrates how history and fiction can converge to tell stories that cry out to be remembered.' --Daily Telegraph

`Perlman excels at these smaller narratives, from which he weaves his grand canvas ... humane, compelling and convincing.' --Sunday Times

`A consummate storyteller ... Chapter by chapter, he gradually brings their stories together in a vast, brilliantly conceived structure.' --Metro, Book of the Week

`Epic is a word that one must use carefully. But this is an epic, in scope and moral seriousness ... Perlman offers an affecting meditation on memory itself, on storytelling as an act of healing.'
--Guardian

'An epic, in scope and moral seriousness ... an effecting meditation on memory itself.' --Guardian

On the crowded streets of New York City there are even more stories than there are people passing each other every day... only some of these stories survive to become history. Lamont Williams, recently released from prison and working as a hospital janitor, strikes up an unlikely friendship with a patient, an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor who starts to tell him of his extraordinary past. Meanwhile Adam Zignelik, the son of a prominent Jewish civil rights lawyer, is facing a personal crisis: almost 40-years-old, his long-term relationship is faltering and his academic career has stalled. It's only when one of his late father's closest friends, the civil rights activist William McCray, suggests a promising research topic that the possibility of some kind of redemption arises. Dealing with memory, racism and the human capacity for guilt, resilience, heroism, and unexpected kindness, The Street Sweeper spans over fifty years, and ranges from New York to Melbourne, Chicago, Warsaw and Auschwitz, as these two very different paths - Adam's and Lamont's - lead to one greater story.