The Tortilla Curtain » (Unabridged, 11 CDs, 840 minutes)

Since the 1980s, T. Coraghessan Boyle has been challenging readers with a smart, surreal style that manages to satirize America's past, present and future all at once. As Barbara Kingsolver wrote of him, "What Boyle does, and does well, is lay on the line our national cult of hypocrisy."

Men and women with brown faces and strong backs who risk everything to cross the Mexican border and invade the American Dream are the Okies of the 1990s. Two of them, Candido and America Rincon, have come to Southern California and are living in a makeshift camp deep in a ravine, fighting off starvation. At the top of Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, the two couples and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.

Library Journal

Go tell it in the valley: Boyle's newest novel is, according to the publicist, "a timely, provocative account" of immigration in central California. With a 100,000-copy first printing and a 25-city tour, you know the publisher expects this book to be big.