Introducing Jeeves - second-hand

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant.

Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens―on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles―the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident―the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins―he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

'The screaming ambulance slows down a fraction as it hits the junction of parkway and Camden High Street. It feels as if my bladder is in my head, and any minute now it will explode, and blast piss and blood at a million-foot-pounds pressure out of my coke-scarred nostrils.' Noah Arkwright has experienced too much. A filmmaker and now a dry alcoholic, he's lived life to the full - sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll his relentless backdrop - but now the stakes are even higher. In his struggle to survive, Noah's cancer forces him to evaluate his chequered past life, and as a picture builds of a brave and incredibly foolish man, gradually it becomes clear that he's a modern-day hero of truly epic proportions.