‘Shockingly original’ The Times
‘A literary freestyler with brio to burn…scabrous and very funny’ Guardian
‘A no-holds-barred comedic romp’ Junot Diaz

After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, aka the Schwa, a little known avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city's dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods and the Berlin Wall in search of his artistic – and spiritual – other.

Ferocious, bombastic and laugh-out-loud funny, Slumberland is the second novel from Man Booker-winner Paul Beatty, a comic genius at the top of his game.

‘What Gore Vidal did for sex and gender constructs, Beatty does for race and prominent black Americans, with sacred cow-tipping on nearly every page. Waterfalls of wordplay that pool and merge like acid jazz on the page.’ 

‘A remarkably strange and funny meditation…revelatory and mind-blowing.’

PAUL BEATTY is the author of the novels Slumberland, Tuff, The White Boy Shuffle and The Sellout, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2016. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce, and is the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. He lives in New York City.