The Pox Party: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson

I was raised in a gaunt house with a garden; my earliest recollections are of floating lights in the apple trees.

On some summer nights, when it was hot and the atmosphere itself seemed cut with anger--the buzzing of the cicadas in the trees of the avenue harsh with it, broiling--on those nights, we could hear mobs go by in the streets, issuing out from the docks.