Ghosts of New York
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
*A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR*
“A wondrous novel, with prose that sparkles like certain sidewalks after rain. . . . That’s it, I thought. That’s exactly what it’s like to live in New York.” —New York Times Book Review
Ghosts of New York is a novel in which the laws of time and space have been subtly suspended. It interweaves four strands: a photographer newly returned to the neighborhood where she grew up, after years spent living overseas; a foundling raised on 14th Street; a graduate student, his romantic partner, and his best friend entangled in a set of relationships with far-reaching personal and political repercussions; and a shopkeeper suffering from first love late in life. Mixing prophecy, history, and a hint of speculative fiction, its stories are bound together even as they are propelled into stranger territory. And undergirding it all is a song, which appears, disappears, and then resurfaces.
Ghosts of New York explores complex lives through indelible renderings of settings—a bar, a night market, a recording studio—that alternate between familiar and unsettling. The work of a celebrated novelist and veteran of the art, film, and music scenes in New York and Austin (described as “a rare talent” by the New York Times and “a powerful literary voice” by Jeffrey Eugenides), this novel will immediately absorb readers intrigued by creative people and the places that sustain and challenge them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lewis (The King Is Dead) maps the meanderings of four New Yorkers in this rich if diffuse series of vignettes. In "The New Love," a drifter named Dominic walks with an older stranger and reflects on the city's haunting permanence ("No one dies in New York without leaving a phantom behind"). In "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," Stephanie, a photographer, celebrates her return after spending seven years abroad by taking in the city's late-night shimmer. Black foster care child Caruso finally finds a place to call home and an attentive audience for his singing voice in "The Lion of Stuyvesant"; and in "Unto Us Lowliest Sometime Sweep," heartbroken shopkeeper Benny is perched on the edge of the Brooklyn Bridge contemplating suicide. Lewis finds great beauty in his descriptions ("Spindrift blew off the parked cars, swirling upwards and mixing with the down-falling storm"), though the many threads drift and occasionally feel unresolved, particularly the late speculative concept of a half-real, half-mechanical bunny sold by street vendors that acts to spread a deadly flu in "The Winter Market." While the character-driven sequences are stylishly conceived and nuanced, the fragmented pieces fall short of completing a bigger picture. Readers will find themselves wishing for a little more.
