The Arrest

Signed first edition, 2020

The Arrest (2020) is set in rural Maine after a worldwide technological collapse. Cars, guns, and electronics have stopped working, and small communities have retreated into agrarian self-sufficiency. Sandy Duplessis, a former Hollywood screenwriter now working as the local food distributor and informal keeper of the peace, finds his quiet life disrupted when Peter Todbaum arrives driving the Blue Streak, a massive nuclear-powered vehicle that shouldn't exist in this world. Todbaum is Sandy's former writing partner and the man who stole his career and his sister, and his arrival with this impossible machine forces a reckoning the community isn't sure it wants. The epigraph, from a Sandra Simonds poem, sets the tone: "Poe thought America was one giant cage." Signed by Lethem on a specially bound-in page, with "Signed First Edition" sticker on front cover.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. New York: Ecco / HarperCollins, 2020. ISBN: 9780062938787. #10561.
Fine in fine dust jacket.