These Dreams of You

One November night in a canyon outside L.A., Zan Nordhoc — a failed novelist turned pirate-radio DJ — sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country's first black president. In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession threatening their home, Zan, his wife and their son set out to solve the enigma of a little girl whose body is a radio, broadcasting a future rhythm & blues that circles the sphere of time. Scattered across two continents, the family meets a mysterious stranger with a secret who sends the story spiraling forty years into the past, from '60s London to '70s Berlin, from the ground zero of civilization to a New World mid-air in its leap of imagination.

"Truly electrifying. In its gorgeous, vivid prose and its acutely sensitive soul, These Dreams of You shows us just what a novel can still do in our own crazy times."
The Boston Globe

"A striking piece of work, fast-moving and far-reaching."
Don DeLillo

"Raises questions, even (or especially) if it can't answer them. It's in the asking, after all, that literature is made."
David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"Drama filled with exuberance... the story is wild enough to do justice to the paradoxes and swings of our 'democrazy.' Erickson's jagged, jazzy voice is his own."
The Washington Post

"Hypnotic...powerful...makes us wonder and cheer enthusiastically about the strange and more than coincidental thing we call life itself."
All Things Considered, NPR

"Actions echo across time, continents and realities...a series of endless, astounding tessellations."
New York Times Book Review

"Beautiful, elegiac, with mazes and labyrinths both real and imagined...a complex and imaginative tapestry about family and identity."
Kirkus (starred review)

"Erickson's skillful use of metafictional techniques, coincidences and resonances expands the story into an absorbing meditation on narrative itself."
The New Yorker

"Superb. Pushes against the idea of the novel as a stagnated medium by flexing its own vitality."
Bookforum

"Magnificent. A big novel of big ideas... As readers rush headlong toward its climax, they may feel as if emerged from a fever dream."
New York Journal of Books

"I am astonished at the emotions this book let flood through my head and heart."
Susan Straight

"May well be today's Great American Novel... the final, choking passage belongs in the same league as the conclusions of The Great Gatsby, On the Road and Vineland."
Los Angeles Review of Books