City on Fire

By: Garth Risk Hallberg

Narrated by: Alex McKenna, Bronson Pinchot, MacLeod Andrews, Paul Michael, Rebecca Lowman, Tristan Morris

NEW YORK. 1977. BE THERE WHEN IT EXPLODES.

It’s New Year’s Eve, 1976, and New York is a city on the edge. As midnight approaches, a blizzard sets in – and amidst the fireworks, an unmistakable sound rings out across Central Park. Gunshots. Two of them.

The search for the shooter will bring together a rich cast of New Yorkers. From the reluctant heirs to one of the city's greatest fortunes, to a couple of Long Island kids drawn to the punk scene downtown. From the newly arrived and enchanted, to those so sick of the city they want to burn it to the ground. All these lives are connected to one another – and to the life that still clings to that body in the park. Whether they know it or not, they are bound up in the same story – a story where history and revolution, love and art, crime and conspiracy are all packed into a single shell, ready to explode.

Then, on July 13th, 1977, the lights go out in New York City.

Critic reviews

Extraordinary…dazzling… a sprawling, generous, warm-hearted epic of 1970s New York

Staggering…gloriously ambitious

Exciting, imaginative and perfectly paced

You’re soon zipping through Hallberg’s vividly realised New York like a child discovering Hogwarts for the first time

This book felt to me like a DVD boxset, in that each chapter was so short that I’d find myself reading just one more, just one more, and then find myself still reading an hour later. I love this book: this is definitely for me the best book we’ve done on the Book Club this year.

Once I started Hallberg's addictive soap opera shuttling between uptown and downtown Manhattan, I couldn't stop ... This is The Goldfinch with a safety pin through its beak. (James Kidd)

A tour de force

There is prose in City on Fire as transporting as any you’re likely to see in a book in the next 10 years

City on Fire is an extraordinary performance. Radiating youthful bravado that will make older authors sniff with contempt (or sweat with envy), Hallberg has conjured what he calls the “muchness” of New York City in the late 1970s … A novel whose Whitmanesque arms embrace an entire city of lovers and strivers, saints and killers … Dazzling (Ron Charles)

The hype is justified: this is the year’s must-read book