I, Wabenzi - Softcover

'I, Wabenzi is a sprawling and brilliant memoir in which novelist and jazz musician Zabor recounts his attempts to get over his parents' deaths by going on a European road journey - although it takes him almost 200 pages to get to the airport. Not that we begrudge the delay, for Zabor's digressions about his family's immigration from Poland to the US, his description of life in Brooklyn and his portrait of his parents' decline are startlingly well-written, the zing and humour of the prose bringing an odd sort of animation.' Financial Times 'Zabor's prose unspools like a jazz riff, painting pictures and setting moods. He's riffing on nothing smaller than the human experience and he sends the reader's mind on parallel journeys. Zabor lets us lose ourselves even as he's finding himself.' New York Times 'A multilayered, metaphoric, mystical, jazzy, jiving, free-associating, freewheeling and delirious autobiographical journey' The Times 'Zabor's account of his New York Jewish upbringing is brilliant: funny, fingernails-in-the-palm self-aware. The writing is dense with universal truths tapped firmly on the head. It's as if Zabor is the world's most marvellous cab driver - he picks his readers up and takes them on the most fascinating, colourful detour imaginable - I will never forget the journey.' Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

Some time ago, Rafi Zabor sat down to write a brief account of 1986. That was the year after his parents died, the year he intended to leave Brooklyn, buy a used car, and drive it across Europe to his golden destination, Istanbul. But like Zabor's journey, this 'brief account' took on a direction of its own - through the shtetl of his father's childhood, via the music of John Coltrane, in the company of a raggle-taggle collection of his family of chancers, dreamers, misfits and magicians. Sitting in the passenger seat, the reader is taken on a mad, exhilarating, beautiful ride, encountering life and death, and a little piece of what lies beyond.