Cahokia Jazz
A Novel
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4.3 • 21 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
* Winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History * Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction * Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, The New York Times, Fresh Air (top 10 pick), NPR, the Los Angeles Times (top 15 pick),The Washington Post, and more!
The bestselling and award-winning author of Golden Hill delivers a "dazzling" (Los Angeles Times), “smoky, brooding noir set in the 1920s” (Slate) that reimagines how American history would be different if, instead of being decimated, indigenous populations had thrived.
Like his earlier novel Golden Hill, Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz inhabits a different version of America, now through the lens of a subtly altered 1920s—a fully imagined world filled with fog, cigarette smoke, dubious motives, danger, and dark deeds. In the main character of hard-boiled detective Joe Barrow, we have a hero of truly epic proportions, a troubled soul to fall in love with as you are swept along by a propulsive and brilliantly twisty plot.
One snowy night at the end of winter, Barrow and his partner find a body on the roof of a skyscraper. Down below, streetcar bells ring, factory whistles blow, Americans drink in speakeasies and dance to the tempo of modern times. But this is Cahokia, the ancient indigenous city beside the Mississippi living on as a teeming industrial metropolis containing people of every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. Yet that corpse on the roof will spark a week of drama in which this altered world will spill its secrets and be brought, against a soundtrack of jazz clarinets and wailing streetcars, either to destruction or rebirth.
“Atmospheric…many of us will recognize our own held-breath bafflement, caught, as we are, on the darkling plain of our own barely believable times” (The Washington Post).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spufford (Light Perpetual) sets his clever latest in an alternate America where the Indigenous population wasn't decimated by the European-borne smallpox epidemic in the 16th century. The resulting change is best exemplified by the city of Cahokia in 1922, where Indigenous people rule hereditarily and are integrated with white and Black populations. Det. Joe Barrow and his corrupt white partner, Phineas Drummond, are called to the rooftop of the Land Trust building, where a dead body has been discovered, eviscerated and missing its heart. Early indications point to an Aztec ritual sacrifice. But the two detectives soon find a link to the local KKK, whose goal is to rid the city of Indigenous rule. Barrow quickly realizes he is in over his head trying to expose a conspiracy that involves a German American bootlegger, a munitions tycoon, an Indigenous femme fatale, and maybe even the Cahokia PD. This richly imagined and densely plotted story refreshes the crime genre and acts as a fun house mirror reflection of contemporary attitudes toward race—all set to a thumping jazz age soundtrack. Standing alongside Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, this is a challenging evocation of an America that never was.
