Jonathan Safran Foer

Foer travelled to Ukraine at nineteen carrying a photograph, looking for the woman who had saved his grandfather during the war, found nothing at all, and turned that failure into Everything Is Illuminated. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close followed, built around a boy whose father died on 11 September. Eating Animals left fiction to argue against factory farming and drew a public reply from his own family's cook. Reviewers divide sharply, some finding the formal tricks moving, others finding them a substitute for feeling.