The Cold Millions
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'A beautiful, lyric hymn to the power of social unrest in American history...funny and harrowing, sweet and violent, innocent and experienced; it walks a dozen tightropes' Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See
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1909. Spokane, Washington.
The Dolan brothers are living by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother Gig dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment.
But then Rye finds himself drawn to suffragette Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and her passion sweeps him into the world of protest and dirty business. As a storm starts brewing, questions of love, sacrifice, brotherhood and betrayal emerge, threatening to overwhelm them all. . .
The Cold Millions is at once an intimate story and a stunning, kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, dreams and reality. Set against the panoramic backdrop of an early 20th century America, Jess Walter offers a sensational tale that resonates powerfully with our own time.
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'A brilliantly multifaceted panorama of early 20th-century America...Walter is a writer whose work deserves a wide readership' Sunday Times
'A work of irresistible characters, harrowing adventures and rip-roaring fun . . . One of the most captivating novels of the year' Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Walter (Beautiful Ruins) reconstructs the free speech riots of 1909 1910 in Spokane, Wash., in this superb tale of orphaned, train-hopping brothers Gig and Rye Dolan. After their mother dies from tuberculosis, Rye, 16, leaves their childhood home in Montana to join Gig. The brothers spend a year looking for seasonal work, then settle in Spokane, the "old Klondike town had grown into a proper city," where "money flowed straight uphill" and a $10 pair of gloves is a class-defining luxury. Rye is arrested during a riot and charged with disorderly conduct, and his lawyer introduces him to the sympathetic Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a New Yorker and union organizer who has come to Spokane to advocate for "the cold millions with no chance in this world." Gig and Rye also meet Ursula the Great, a bawdy vaudevillian who cavorts in corset and stockings with a caged cougar and wins Gig's heart despite her romantic involvement with a mining boss. The novel's cast mixes fictional characters and historical figures such as labor lawyer Fred Moore, police chief John Sullivan, and organizers John Walsh and Frank Little, and adds a literary layer to Gig's self-determination (he travels with a library including White Fang and two volumes of War and Peace, "always on the lookout for the rest"). The sum is a splendid postmodern rendition of the social realist novels of the 1930s by Henry Roth, John Steinbeck, and John Dos Passos, updated with strong female characters and executed with pristine prose. This could well be Walter's best work yet.
