Last Night in Brooklyn

A Novel

De: Xochitl Gonzalez

Narrado por: Elizabeth Rodriguez

New York Times bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez delivers a captivating story about a young woman whose life becomes ensnared in her glamorous neighbor’s secret past

SPRING, 2007

At twenty-six, Alicia Canales Forten feels smothered by her future. She’s in a long-distance relationship, living at home with her mother’s beliefs, saving up for her wedding to a future doctor. But after Alicia ventures out one night in the neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, she finds herself lured by the siren song of youth and possibility that the striving crowd of creatives holds, and moves in.

No one embodies this milieu more than La Garza, a larger-than-life, up-and-coming fashion designer whose epic house parties fuel neighborhood lore. La Garza’s life, observed by Alicia from her apartment across the street, seems to hold the allure and fearlessness Alicia has never dared to imagine for herself.

But when Alicia’s wealthy banker cousin moves to the neighborhood, she finds herself increasingly drawn into both his and La Garza’s precarious lives.

Against the backdrop of a potentially life-changing presidential election and a looming once-in-a-generation fiscal crisis, Last Night in Brooklyn explores the dark compromise of the American Dream for people of color living, unknowingly, in the twilight of a cultural moment. It is a story about everything money can buy—and the destruction of what it can’t.

Reseñas de la Crítica

Praise for Last Night in Brooklyn

"The Brooklyn story I've been waiting for, replete with all the glamor, stakes, and capital D drama of a modern Great Gatsby. No one writes about ambition, money, class, and the cost of survival in a world driven by profit over people quite like Gonzalez. Equally, no one captures joy, community, and the sweetness of belonging like her either. Thrillingly alive and electrically entertaining from start to finish, Last Night in Brooklyn is a triumph." —Coco Mellors, New York Times bestselling author of Blue Sisters

"Xochitl’s Gonzalez’s pages are packed full of the splendor and vertigo of split identities and divided allegiances, which marks her and her book as Brooklyn to the bone. A student of urban betrayal and communal memory, she not only knows where the bodies are buried, she knows how to make them get up and dance again.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and A Different Kind of Tension

“It is a treat to read Xochitl Gonzalez, who writes with intimacy, immediacy, and singular charm that seizes you from the first page and never lets go. Last Night in Brooklyn is a stunning achievement: The Great Gatsby reimagined for Black and brown Brooklyn, elegantly evocative and chattily profound. It is at once an exploration into the cost of ambition, a loving portrait of the people and places we are always on the verge of losing, and a fitting elegy for what is already gone.”—Rachel Khong, New York Times Bestselling author of Real Americans