Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, Oskar sets out to solve the mystery of a key he disovers in his father's closet. It is a search which leads him into the lives of strangers, through the five boroughs of New York, into history, to the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, and on an inward journey which brings him ever closer to some kind of peace.

Jonathan Safran Foer was born in 1977. He is the author of Everything is Illuminated, which won the Guardian First Book award, and the editor of A Convergence of Birds, to be published by Hamish Hamilton in 2006.