Elliot Perlman

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.

How breathtakingly close we are to lives that at first seem so far away.From the civil rights struggle in the United States to the Nazi crimes against humanity in Europe, there are more stories than people passing one another every day on the bustling streets of every crowded city. Only some stories survive to become history.Recently released from prison, Lamont Williams, an African American probationary janitor in a Manhattan hospital and father of a little girl he can't locate, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly patient, a Holocaust survivor who was a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau.A few blocks uptown, historian Adam Zignelik, an untenured Columbia professor, finds both his career and his long-term romantic relationship falling apart. Emerging from the depths of his own personal history, Adam sees, in a promising research topic suggested by an American World War II veteran, the beginnings of something that might just save him professionally, and perhaps even personally.As these men try to survive in early-twenty-first-century New York, history comes to life in ways neither of them could have foreseen. Two very different paths--Lamont's and Adam's--lead to one greater story as The Street Sweeper, in dealing with memory, love, guilt, heroism, the extremes of racism and unexpected kindness, spans the twentieth century to the present, and spans the globe from New York to Chicago to Auschwitz.Epic in scope, this is a remarkable feat of storytelling.

A collection of nine short stories by the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity explores the complex worlds of such protagonists as lovers, poets, lawyers, immigrants, students, and murderers, in a volume that follows such themes as betrayal and lost opportunities. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

Frustrated by years of unrequited love, an unemployed schoolteacher takes matters into his own hands, with unexpected repercussions, in a novel about obsessive love, told in seven parts by six different narrators whose lives have become entangled with one another. Reprint.

At once a psychological thriller and a social critique, Seven Types of Ambiguity is a novel of obsessive love in an age of obsessive materialism.Following years of unrequited love, an out-of-work schoolteacher decides to take matters into his own hands, triggering a chain of events no one could have anticipated.This is a story of impulse and paralysis, of empty marriages, lovers and a small boy, gambling and the market, of adult children and their parents, of poetry and prostitution, psychiatry and the law.Published to huge acclaim in the author's native Australia, Seven Types of Ambiguity was hailed as 'a tour de force' (The Age) and described as 'Perlman's achingly humane, richly layered and seamlessly constructed masterpiece' (Canberra Times).