Fiskadoro, paperback/denis johnson

Daring and provocative.

Startlingly original New York Times The nuclear holocaust has been and gone, and now everything is different.

In Twicetown, once Key West, two missiles sit unexploded, objects of awe and indifference.

Mr Cheung teaches the boy Fiskadoro to play the clarinet; Grandmother Wright, the oldest person in the world, endlessly relives the fall of Saigon; Cassius Clay Sugar Ray trades in radioactive artefacts.

Boats go out to comb the sea for fish, and the sea keeps some of the men.

Tossing fitfully in nightmares of forgotten wars, lazing in the tropical heat, the flotsam and jetsam of a lost civilization pursue their lives through a world of fractured memories.

And they wait - for the Cubans to come, for the Quarantine to be lifted, for the god Quetzalcoatl, the god Bob Marley, the god Jesus to return and build their kingdoms.

From the author of Tree of Smoke, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.