A paroled felon working as a street sweeper at a large city hospital meets a Holocaust survivor who tells him the story of his ordeal in a Nazi death camp, even as a struggling professor discovers evidence that black American soldiers helped to liberate a concentration camp. It may sound complicated, but Elliot Perlman (鈥淪even Types of Ambiguity鈥) manages to weave these threads into a satisfying whole. (January)
The Street Sweeper
By Elliot Perlman
Penguin, 640 pp.