“What an audacious debut: a novel that reframes The Odyssey as a journey across Los Angeles during the Watts Riots. Beautiful, hard-edged, challenging, and unexpected, Graffiti Palace recalls the linguistic exuberance of Thomas Pynchon while evoking the surreal landscape of a city under siege. At the same time, it never loses sight of the essential human drama—the desire, despite (or because of) everything that’s happening, to find a passage home."