334

If Charles Dickens has written speculative fiction, he might have created a novel as intricate, passionate, and lacerating as Thomas M. Disch's visionary portrait of the underbelly of 21st century New York City.

The residents of the public housing project at 334 East 11th Street live in a world of rationed babied and sanctioned drug addiction. Real food is displayed in museums and hospital attendants moonlight as body-snatchers.

Nimbly hop scotching backward and forward in time, Disch charts the shifting relationships between this world's inheritors: an ageing matriarch who falls in love with her young social worker; a widow seeking comfort from the spirit of her dead husband; a privileged preteen choreographing the perfectly gratuitous murder. Poisonously funny, piercingly authentic, 344 is a masterpiece of social realism disguised as science fiction.