Spoonbenders
*** The BBC Radio 2 Book Club choice ***
*** Bought for TV by Paramount ***
'Funny and charming . . . tailor-made for summer . . . magical' New York Times Book Review
'Hilarious, freewheeling' Guardian
'Gloriously imaginative' Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
They were the Amazing Telemachus Family, who in the mid-1970s achieved widespread fame for their magic and mind reading act. That is, until the magic decided to disappear one night, live on national television.
We encounter this long-forgotten family two decades on, when grandson Matty, born long after the public fall from grace, discovers powers in himself and realises his hugely deflated, heavily indebted family truly are amazing.
Spoonbenders is the legacy and legend of a dysfunctional, normal, entirely unique family across three generations of big personalities and socially inept recluses - each cursed with the potential of being something special.
Daryl Gregory grew up in Chicago and has lived in various other cities within a few miles of the continent-spanning highway, Interstate 80, including his current home, Oakland, California. He's been a high school teacher, a technical writer, and a programmer, and now writes full time, occasionally dabbling in comics and videogame scripts.
His short novel We Are All Completely Fine won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson award, and was a finalist for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus awards. The novel Afterparty was a National Public Radio and Kirkus Best Fiction book of the year. Spoonbenders is his first work of literary fiction.