The best New York novels
8/23/2017
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk: A Novel
NOW A NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER
“Transporting…witty, poignant and sparkling.”
―People (People Picks Book of the Week)
“Prescient and quick....A perfect fusing of subject and writer, idea and ideal.”
―Chicago Tribune
“Extraordinary…hilarious…Elegantly written, Rooney creates a glorious paean to a distant literary life and time―and an unabashed celebration of human connections that bridge past and future.
―Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed)
"Rooney's delectably theatrical fictionalization is laced with strands of tart poetry and emulates the dark sparkle of Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Truman Capote. Effervescent with verve, wit, and heart, Rooney’s nimble novel celebrates insouciance, creativity, chance, and valor."
―Booklist (starred review)
“In my reckless and undiscouraged youth,” Lillian Boxfish writes, “I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street…”
She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy’s to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, “in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it.”
Now it’s the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp and savvy as ever, is on her way to a party. It’s chilly enough out for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier now―her son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowl―but the quick-tongued poetess has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed―and has not.
A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.
Lillian figures she might as well take her time. For now, after all, the night is still young.
City of Glass: The Graphic Novel
A graphic novel classic with a new introduction by Art Spiegelman
Quinn writes mysteries. The Washington Post has described him as a "post-existentialist private eye." An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print.
Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster's groundbreaking, Edgar Award-nominated masterwork has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language.
"[This graphic novel] is, surprisingly, not just a worthy supplement to the novel, but a work of art that fully justifies its existence on its own terms."--The Guardian
Namaste New York: A Novel
The inspiring story of three Poor Indian Graduate Students (also called "PIGS") in their early twenties who arrive in America with little concept of the challenges they will face as they make their way in a strange new land that offers both extraordinary opportunities and devastating heartbreak. Vijay was only a boy when his father heroically lost his life during the 1993 Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay. From the time of his death, Vijay knew that he would travel to America one day in order to fulfill his father's dreams. But he never could have imagined that America might have its own plans for him, or that the dreams he had for himself could change so unexpectedly.
For Lakshminarayanan, coming to America was both an escape from the fate that awaited him in India and an opportunity to save his family from an impoverished life that threatened their very survival. He had to make his plans work no matter what the personal cost, as his future was not the only one at stake. Raj was reticent about his past, secretive about his present, and never discussed his future. But he was certain of his destiny, and every decision in his life up until this point had been made with a singular goal in mind, a goal that had nothing to do with earning money, obtaining an education, or building a successful career.
But all he had was a faded photograph, a CD of grainy images of 9/11, and admission to a prestigious American university. He wasn't sure it would be enough, but he couldn't turn back now. The lives of these three boys become immutably intertwined as they embark on a journey that will alter their beliefs about themselves and each other, and irrevocably change the lives of those around them. This is a story of struggle, loss, hope, love, friendship, and the indomitable spirit that resides in the hearts of immigrants who share a common ambition, endure a common struggle, and strive to make a better life for themselves and those they love.
Black Tom: A Novel of Sabotage in New York Harbor
The year is 1916. War rages in Europe while Patrick Kelly, a young patrolman in the Jersey City Police Department, has battles of his own to fight. He dreams of heroic exploits, little knowing how the old grudge between his father and Frank Hague, Patrick’s boss, will ruin his plans, or how his love for Claire Connolly, a beautiful chorus girl, will change his life. Least of all does he see the spectre of Black Tom. Despite America's neutrality in the war, U.S. manufacturers are engaged in making and selling to the Allies an enormous amount of arms of all kinds. Before these weapons are loaded onto ships and sent across the Atlantic, they are stored at Black Tom Island in Jersey City, a munitions depot projecting into New York Harbor just behind the Statue of Liberty.
On July 30, 1916, a massive explosion shakes the harbor, a blast so tremendous it’s felt in Philadelphia and Baltimore. German agents have sabotaged the munitions depot, with its huge store of shrapnel shells, rifle cartridges, gunpowder and other ammunition and explosives, turning it into an inferno. The cataclysm rocks Jersey City, Manhattan, and Brooklyn to the core, terrifying residents, causing staggering destruction, and resulting in death and injury. Down at Black Tom, Patrick’s opportunity for heroism has arrived, but at what terrible cost? Black Tom is a novel rich in historical detail, a vivid portrait of Jersey City and New York City in the years before the U.S. entered the Great War. It is a love story and a tale of local politics and international espionage.
Surrender, New York: A Novel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Imaginative and fulfilling . . . an addictive contemporary crime procedural.”—Michael Connelly, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
Caleb Carr, the author of The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness, returns with a contemporary, edge-of-your-seat thriller featuring the brilliant but unconventional criminal psychologist Dr. Trajan Jones.
In the small town of Surrender in upstate New York, Dr. Jones, a psychological profiler, and Dr. Michael Li, a trace evidence expert, teach online courses in profiling and forensic science from Jones’s family farm. Once famed advisors to the New York City Police Department, Trajan and Li now work in exile, having made enemies of those in power. Protected only by farmhands and Jones’s unusual “pet,” the outcast pair is unexpectedly called in to consult on a disturbing case.
In rural Burgoyne County, a pattern of strange deaths has emerged: adolescent boys and girls are found murdered in gruesome fashion. Senior law enforcement officials are quick to blame a serial killer, yet their efforts to apprehend this criminal are peculiarly ineffective.
Jones and Li soon discover that the victims are all “throwaway children,” a new state classification of young people who are neither orphans, runaways, nor homeless, but who are abandoned by their families and left to fend for themselves. Two of these throwaways, Lucas Kurtz and his older sister, Ambyr, cross paths with Jones and Li, offering information that could blow the case wide open.
As the stakes grow higher, Jones and Li must not only unravel the mystery of how the throwaways died but also defend themselves and the Kurtz siblings against shadowy agents who don’t want the truth to get out. Jones believes the real story leads back to the city where both he and Dr. Kreizler did their greatest work. But will Jones and Li be able to trace the case to New York before they fall victim to the murderous forces that stalk them?
Tautly paced and richly researched, Surrender, New York brings to life the grim underbelly of a prosperous nation—and those most vulnerable to its failings. This brilliant novel marks another milestone in Caleb Carr’s triumphant literary suspense career.
Praise for Surrender, New York
“[A] page-turning thriller . . . For maximum enjoyment: surrender, reader.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Every word of fiction Carr has produced seems to have been written in either direct or indirect conversation with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. . . . [Surrender, New York] allows Carr to deploy his indisputable gift for the gothic and the macabre, and the pursuit is suspenseful and believable.”—USA Today
“[A] long-awaited return.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“[A] superb mystery . . . [that moves] at a swift and often terrifying pace. As in The Alienist, Carr triumphs at every twist and turn.”—Providence Journal
“Edgar Allan Poe would have understood this book and hailed it a masterpiece. . . . A terrific story with a great setting and a very modern social message.”—The Globe and Mail
“[An] engrossing mystery.”—Library Journal
“A compulsive read . . . Carr once again delivers a high-stakes thriller featuring a new band of clever, determined outcasts.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Carr’s many fans will find this well worth the wait.”—Kirkus Reviews
Caleb Carr, the author of The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness, returns with a contemporary, edge-of-your-seat thriller featuring the brilliant but unconventional criminal psychologist Dr. Trajan Jones.
In the small town of Surrender in upstate New York, Dr. Jones, a psychological profiler, and Dr. Michael Li, a trace evidence expert, teach online courses in profiling and forensic science from Jones’s family farm. Once famed advisors to the New York City Police Department, Trajan and Li now work in exile, having made enemies of those in power. Protected only by farmhands and Jones’s unusual “pet,” the outcast pair is unexpectedly called in to consult on a disturbing case.
In rural Burgoyne County, a pattern of strange deaths has emerged: adolescent boys and girls are found murdered in gruesome fashion. Senior law enforcement officials are quick to blame a serial killer, yet their efforts to apprehend this criminal are peculiarly ineffective.
Jones and Li soon discover that the victims are all “throwaway children,” a new state classification of young people who are neither orphans, runaways, nor homeless, but who are abandoned by their families and left to fend for themselves. Two of these throwaways, Lucas Kurtz and his older sister, Ambyr, cross paths with Jones and Li, offering information that could blow the case wide open.
As the stakes grow higher, Jones and Li must not only unravel the mystery of how the throwaways died but also defend themselves and the Kurtz siblings against shadowy agents who don’t want the truth to get out. Jones believes the real story leads back to the city where both he and Dr. Kreizler did their greatest work. But will Jones and Li be able to trace the case to New York before they fall victim to the murderous forces that stalk them?
Tautly paced and richly researched, Surrender, New York brings to life the grim underbelly of a prosperous nation—and those most vulnerable to its failings. This brilliant novel marks another milestone in Caleb Carr’s triumphant literary suspense career.
Praise for Surrender, New York
“[A] page-turning thriller . . . For maximum enjoyment: surrender, reader.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Every word of fiction Carr has produced seems to have been written in either direct or indirect conversation with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. . . . [Surrender, New York] allows Carr to deploy his indisputable gift for the gothic and the macabre, and the pursuit is suspenseful and believable.”—USA Today
“[A] long-awaited return.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“[A] superb mystery . . . [that moves] at a swift and often terrifying pace. As in The Alienist, Carr triumphs at every twist and turn.”—Providence Journal
“Edgar Allan Poe would have understood this book and hailed it a masterpiece. . . . A terrific story with a great setting and a very modern social message.”—The Globe and Mail
“[An] engrossing mystery.”—Library Journal
“A compulsive read . . . Carr once again delivers a high-stakes thriller featuring a new band of clever, determined outcasts.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Carr’s many fans will find this well worth the wait.”—Kirkus Reviews
Sex Wars: A Novel of Gilded Age New York
Post–Civil War New York City is the battleground of the American dream. In this era of free love, emerging rights of women, and brutal sexual repression, Freydeh, a spirited young Jewish immigrant, toils at different jobs to earn passage to America for her family. Learning that her younger sister is adrift somewhere in the city, she begins a determined search that carries her from tenement to brothel to prison—as her story interweaves with those of some of the epoch's most notorious figures: Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Susan B. Anthony; sexual freedom activist Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president; and Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose censorship laws are still on the books.
In the tradition of her bestselling World War II epic Gone to Soldiers, Marge Piercy once again re-creates a turbulent period in American history and explores changing attitudes in a land of sacrifice, suffering, promise, and reward.
New York, Actually: A Romance Novel
One man. One woman. Two dogs.
Meet Molly—New York's most famous advice columnist, she considers herself an expert at relationships…as long as they're other people's. Still bruised from her last breakup, Molly is in no rush to find happily-ever-after—the only love of her life is her dalmatian, Valentine.
Meet Daniel—A cynical divorce lawyer, he's hardwired to think relationships are a bad idea. If you don't get involved, no one can get hurt. Until he finds himself borrowing a dog to meet the gorgeous woman he sees running in Central Park every morning…
Molly and Daniel both think they know everything about relationships. But as they try—and fail—to resist their undeniable chemistry, they'll soon discover they just might have a lot left to learn…
Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York
WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD
WINNER OF THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE
WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE
NAMED “NOVEL OF THE YEAR” BY THE UK’S SUNDAY TIMES
“Delirious storytelling backfilled with this much intelligence is a rare and happy sight.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“[Francis Spufford is] an author capable of making any topic, however unlikely, at once fascinating and amusing. Golden Hill is both.” —The New Yorker
“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —The Guardian
The spectacular first novel from acclaimed nonfiction author Francis Spufford follows the adventures of a mysterious young man in mid-eighteenth century Manhattan, thirty years before the American Revolution.
New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat arrives at a countinghouse door on Golden Hill Street: this is Mr. Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion shimmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge sum, and he won’t explain why, or where he comes from, or what he is planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him?
Rich in language and historical perception, yet compulsively readable, Golden Hill is a story “taut with twists and turns” that “keeps you gripped until its tour-de-force conclusion” (The Times, London). Spufford paints an irresistible picture of a New York provokingly different from its later metropolitan self but already entirely a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love—and find a world of trouble.
WINNER OF THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE
WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE
NAMED “NOVEL OF THE YEAR” BY THE UK’S SUNDAY TIMES
“Delirious storytelling backfilled with this much intelligence is a rare and happy sight.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“[Francis Spufford is] an author capable of making any topic, however unlikely, at once fascinating and amusing. Golden Hill is both.” —The New Yorker
“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —The Guardian
The spectacular first novel from acclaimed nonfiction author Francis Spufford follows the adventures of a mysterious young man in mid-eighteenth century Manhattan, thirty years before the American Revolution.
New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat arrives at a countinghouse door on Golden Hill Street: this is Mr. Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion shimmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge sum, and he won’t explain why, or where he comes from, or what he is planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him?
Rich in language and historical perception, yet compulsively readable, Golden Hill is a story “taut with twists and turns” that “keeps you gripped until its tour-de-force conclusion” (The Times, London). Spufford paints an irresistible picture of a New York provokingly different from its later metropolitan self but already entirely a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love—and find a world of trouble.
New York: The Novel
Winner of the David J. Langum, Sr., Prize in American Historical Fiction
Named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and “Required Reading” by the New York Post
Edward Rutherfurd celebrates America’s greatest city in a rich, engrossing saga, weaving together tales of families rich and poor, native-born and immigrant—a cast of fictional and true characters whose fates rise and fall and rise again with the city’s fortunes. From this intimate perspective we see New York’s humble beginnings as a tiny Indian fishing village, the arrival of Dutch and British merchants, the Revolutionary War, the emergence of the city as a great trading and financial center, the convulsions of the Civil War, the excesses of the Gilded Age, the explosion of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the trials of World War II, the near demise of New York in the 1970s and its roaring rebirth in the 1990s, and the attack on the World Trade Center. A stirring mix of battle, romance, family struggles, and personal triumphs, New York: The Novel gloriously captures the search for freedom and opportunity at the heart of our nation’s history.
Named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and “Required Reading” by the New York Post
Edward Rutherfurd celebrates America’s greatest city in a rich, engrossing saga, weaving together tales of families rich and poor, native-born and immigrant—a cast of fictional and true characters whose fates rise and fall and rise again with the city’s fortunes. From this intimate perspective we see New York’s humble beginnings as a tiny Indian fishing village, the arrival of Dutch and British merchants, the Revolutionary War, the emergence of the city as a great trading and financial center, the convulsions of the Civil War, the excesses of the Gilded Age, the explosion of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the trials of World War II, the near demise of New York in the 1970s and its roaring rebirth in the 1990s, and the attack on the World Trade Center. A stirring mix of battle, romance, family struggles, and personal triumphs, New York: The Novel gloriously captures the search for freedom and opportunity at the heart of our nation’s history.
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