“His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.”

Written around the same time as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade “best-of” list, saying: “This 2000 novel blended comic books, Jewish mysticism, and American history into something truly amazing.”

The novel is centred around two Jewish cousins before, during, and after World War II. Joe Kavalier, a young artist trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, flees Nazi-occupied Prague in a coffin and ends up in the Brooklyn bedroom of his cousin Sam Clay who is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit America – the comic book. Together, they invent The Escapist: a superhero who saves the oppressed around the world. While Sam, wrapped up in his American life, struggles with being a closet homosexual, Joe obsesses about how he, along with The Escapist, will free his family from the clutches of Hitler.

“Chabon manages to capture the flavour of pulp fiction, without its banality,” notes reviewer Ted Gioia. “He stuffs his novel with more plot twists than an old movie serial, but never loses the thread of his main story. He captures a surreal sense of fantasy, without abandoning the grounded History of his narrative.”

Kavalier & Clay also received nominations for National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. A film adaptation began pre-production in 2001 and is yet to be released.

Published in 2000.