Telegraph Avenue - Michael Chabon

One street, two families. As the summer of 2004 draws to a close,
Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there, longtime
friends, band mates and co-regents of Brokeland Records. Their
wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth
Partners, a pair of semi-legendary nurse midwives. Archy and Gwen
are expecting their first baby; Nat and Aviva have a teenaged son,
Julius. When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode announces plans to go
forward with the construction of his latest Dogpile megastore on
Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear the worst for their vulnerable
little enterprise. But behind Goode's announcement a nefarious
story lurks. As their husbands struggle to mount a defence, Aviva
and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a professional struggle
that tests the limits of their friendship. And simultaneously, into
their already tangled lives, comes Titus Joyner, the teenaged son
Archy has never acknowledged, now the love of Julius Jaffe's life.
An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of
classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical
style all its own. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling,
humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet.