From the critically acclaimed author of Here I Am, Everything is Illuminated and We are the Weather - a heartrending and unforgettable novel set in the aftermath of the 9/11 'Utterly engaging, hugely involving, tragic, funny and intensely moving... A heartbreaker' Spectator 'The most incredible fictional nine-year-old ever created... a funny, heart-rending portrayal of a child coping with disaster. It will have you biting back the tears' Glamour 'Pulsates with dazzling ideas' Times Literary Supplement 'It's a miracle... So impeccably imagined, so courageously executed, so everlastingly moving' Baltimore Sun 'Jonathan Safran Foer is a writer of considerable brilliance' Observer In a vase in a closet, a couple of years after his father died in 9/11, nine-year-old Oskar discovers a key... The key belonged to his father, he's sure of that. But which of New York's 162 million locks does it open? So begins a quest that takes Oskar - inventor, letter-writer and amateur detective - across New York's five boroughs and into the jumbled lives of friends, relatives and complete strangers. He gets heavy boots, he gives himself little bruises and he inches ever nearer to the heart of a family mystery that stretches back fifty years. But will it take him any closer to, or even further from, his lost father?