A Visit from the Goon Squad

Thirteen chapters, each a self contained story, following a loose constellation of people connected to Bennie Salazar, a record executive who was once in a San Francisco punk band, and Sasha, his assistant, who steals things compulsively.

The chapters jump between the late 1970s and roughly the 2020s, change narrator every time, and are told in whatever form suits them. One is a magazine profile of a film star that goes catastrophically wrong. One is in the second person. One, famously, is a seventy page PowerPoint presentation made by a twelve year old girl about the pauses in rock songs, which sounds like a gimmick and is the most affecting thing in the book.

The goon of the title is time, and Egan's subject is what it does to people who were briefly at the centre of something. Almost every character is encountered young and then, later, in a chapter set decades on, and the gap between the two is where the book lives. Lou, the predatory record producer on safari with his children and girlfriend, turns up much later as a dying man. Scotty, the band's lost guitarist, walks into Bennie's office with a fish he caught in the East River.

It works as a novel and as stories, and readers argue about which it is. Read it in order, because the pleasure is in recognising a minor figure from chapter three as the narrator of chapter nine, and that only happens forwards.

It is not difficult, only unusual, and at around three hundred pages it moves. Best for readers who like ambitious structure and would rather be trusted than guided.