This is a story of two brothers: Homer, blind from childhood, is our compassionate, mild-mannered narrator. Langley, an eccentric intellectual, returns from the trenches of World War I damaged to his core. It is also the story of the twentieth century, the fading out of late nineteenth-century optimism and the upheaval that marks the rise of the current era. Embedded in their New York, Park Avenue brownstone, and at the end of their family line, the two brothers have all the upper middle-class virtues – educated, cultured, self-centred, yet highly principled. As the years progress, they find themselves in a disastrous, self-imposed exile, experiencing the outside world as a powerful antagonist, determined to thrust its history upon them.

This is my first time reading Doctorow and now I know what all the fuss is about. This is a magnificent achievement. Homer’s narration is at turns funny and melancholy, as he narrates his life story, with all its fleeting moments and passing relationships. But it is the depiction of brotherly love, of Homer’s bemused, quiet suffering at the hands of the well-meaning but increasingly deranged Langley, that is the true strength of this novel. It made this a book I could not put down.