Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn is a wry, hard-boiled detective novel with a deeply original voice: Lionel Essrog, a Brooklyn private investigator with Tourette’s syndrome, finds his meticulous routines tested when the man who raised him is murdered. Blending noir, comic misdirection, and sharp emotional insight, the novel follows Lionel through the city’s underworld as he pieces together clues, navigates unreliable instincts, and searches for meaning in a world that rarely makes sense.