Manyebook

Looped

A remarkably assured and accomplished debut novel that encompasses the bursting life of contemporary Chicago, Looped tells the separate stories of a diverse group of Chicagoans — black, brown, and white, gay, straight, and bi — as their lives unfold in diverging and (occasionally) converging ways over the course of the year 2000. Among the characters are the family of a middle-class black postman whose runaway daughter has just learned she’s pregnant; a gifted half-Vietnamese high-schooler whose troubled father spies on the son he abandoned years earlier; a tradition-bound Greek diner owner whose upwardly mobile daughter, embarrassed by her ethnic roots, is snarled in a loveless marriage; a gay chef whose shaky relationship is strained by the visit of his closeted lover’s uncle, a Catholic priest; and the motley members of an up-and-coming band shaken by the breakup of its ambitious lead guitarist and his sexually confused songwriter girlfriend. Ambitious, sprawling, engrossing, multifaceted, insightful, and addictively readable, Looped explodes with a life and vitality that mirrors the multicultural reality of twenty-first century Chicago, where the families that sustain us are more likely to be those we’ve created than those we’re born to.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 409
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780972456296
  • Settings
  • Chicago, Illinois
  • Genres
  • fiction
  • Release date
  • 2005