Presenting EVAN TANNER—the first series character created by Lawrence Block, bestselling author of A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES...

Ever since a shred of shrapnel did a number on his brain’s sleep center, Even Tanner has been awake 24/7. This gives him more time than your average underachiever. Time to learn the world’s languages (he’s fluent in Basque, but has trouble with Chinese). Time to embrace the world’s lost causes and irredentist movements (The Flat Earth Society, the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia, the Society of the Left Hand). Time to write term papers theses for students with more money than knowledge. And, most important, time to do his dreaming while he’s wide awake.

When we left Tanner—at the end of his 7th adventure in Me Tanner, You Jane—he was just back from Modonoland. That was in 1970—and now we meet up with him again and it's 1998. How on earth did that happen?

In Tanneresque fashion, it must be said. Because of his membership in an irredentist movement seeking to restore a province of southern Sweden to Denmark, agents of the Stockholm government lure Tanner and drug him. But, too Scandinavian in nature to kill him outright, they stow him in a frozen-food locker in the sub-basement of a house in Union City, New Jersey. (Hey, everybody has to be someplace.) When Tanner wakes up and thaws out, it's a quarter of a century later and he hasn't aged a day.

Which makes for interesting complications. His ward, the Lithuanian princess Minna, is now only a few years younger than he is. And an old drinking buddy of his and occasional playwright is now the president of half of Czechoslovakia. All in all, the world has changed beyond recognition.

So he goes to Burma. Like, where else?