The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman

The Street Sweeper

Elliot Perlman

This is epic and bold storytelling featuring the relationship and life struggles of an African American janitor and a Jewish academic. The lives of closely researched and interlinked characters from the holocaust to the American Civil Rights movement emerge in a passionate powerful and memorable testimony that recollects cruelty, heroism, kindness and love. This mixture of sometimes harrowing fact and hopeful fiction lives long in the memory.

Extract
Tell everyone what happened here . . . . A myriad of languages jostled fiercely with each other from the mouths of people of disparate ages and origins who shared only that, en masse, they were more broken from their first hand experience of what humans are able to visit on one another, more broken from their unasked - for and unusually refined understanding of life's jagged extremes than perhaps any other collection of people on earth.
Parallels
  • All That I Am by Anna Funder
  • The Breaking of Eggs by Jim Powell