Metropolis - Softcover

Gaffney, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812970853 ISBN 13: 9780812970852

Publisher: Random House Group, 2006

Synopsis

On a freezing night in the middle of a New York winter, a young immigrant is suddenly awakened by a fire in P. T. Barnum's stable, where he works and sleeps, and soon finds himself at the center of a citywide arson investigation. Determined to clear his name and realize the dreams that inspired his hazardous voyage to America, he will change his identity many times, find himself mixed up with one of the city's toughest and most enterprising gangs, and fall in love with a smart, headstrong, and beautiful woman. Buffeted by the forces of fate, hate, luck, and passion, our hero struggles to build a life-and just to stay alive-on an epic journey that is at once unique and poignantly emblematic of the American experience.

About this title

Review:

"Rewarding . . . vivid tableaus and high drama . . . immigrant dreams and desires on the scrappy streets of Five Points."
-The New York Times

"Engaged with history, artfully structured, told with dashing wit . . . full of passions and perils, desire and deceit . . . Metropolis teems with imagined life, as a good page-turner should."
-San Jose Mercury News

"Brawny, old-school storytelling . . . a novel as strong and heady as the brew [Gaffney's] rakes and roustabouts swill by the pint."
-Newsweek

"Metropolis is more than a literary page-turner; it is also a coming-of-age story for a young and strapping New York."
-Vanity Fair

"Engrossing . . . fraught with suspense."
-Elle

From the Publisher:

A hugely entertaining and richly realised literary historical first novel, set in the New York underworld of the 1860s, in the tradition of Caleb Carr's The Alienist and Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White.

'Mesmerizing... An extraordinary achievement' Daily Telegraph

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Group
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0812970853
• ISBN 13: 9780812970852
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496