Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer (on CD)

Disclaimer 1: I tried reading Foer's Everything Is Illuminated which sounded wonderful...till I tried read it. Gave up; too weird.

Disclaimer 2: I wouldn't have read this book with my eyes. It's also very weird. But the narrators are excellent in this version, and I was hooked on the kid...the main character.

The kid, Oskar Schell is precocious in the extreme. At age 9 he knows far more than he 'should' about many things, including the death of his father in the World Trade Center tragedy. Oskar discovers a key in his father's closet months after his death, and spends the next several months searching for the owner of the lock based on some very slim evidence.

Interwoven in the main story are the stories of Oskar's grandmother and grandfather--separate stories but both equally sad and poignant that also begin with bombs, bombs that were dropped on Dresden over 60 years ago.

Wonderful stories, really fabulous characterizations of all the very different people. This is probably the first book I've ever read that made me think that living in New York City might not be such a bad thing.