City

From the author of the international bestseller Silk (“A riveting, lyrical love story” —Alan Cheuse, NPR) and the acclaimed Ocean Sea (“Astonishing . . . vividly erotic”—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times) comes an entirely new species of fiction: a panoramic Cartesian comic book of a novel—with superheroes, boxers, cowboys, and one bed-wetting prodigy expected to win the Nobel Prize.

Baricco’s wildly inventive story, set in the United States, describes the improbable relationship between two untethered souls: Gould, a thirteen-year-old genius, and Shatzy Shell, his thirtysomething governess. Except for each other, they abide beyond human connection, each in a private world of serial imagination: in Shatzy’s case, the violent Wild West show she has been improvising into a tape recorder since the age of six; in Gould’s, the mock-heroic tale of an underdog boxer, which the boy tells to his imaginary friends, a giant and a mute. With the narrative logic of a comic strip, City’s quicksilver prose flows unpredictably between the whimsy of childhood conjuring and the serpentine realm of metaphysics, cunningly reminding us how the imaginings of children can harbor the stuff of tragedy, while the grandest ideas of adults are often strictly for kids.

By turns hilarious and deeply sad, City is an American original, penned by a brilliant Italian.

“Filled with wild invention and lyrical prose . . . Conventional characters and superheroes alike behave with the wild abandon we have come to recognize in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo and Robert Coover. City is simultaneously hilarious and profoundly sad.”
--Sanford Pinsker, Washington Post Book World

“An imaginative, surprisingly poignant Italian reinvention of what has become a staple of American teen fiction: the saga of marginalized members of society who find comfort in each other.”
--Beth Warrell, Booklist

“Baricco has inventiveness in spades, and his freaks have the capacity to chill the blood or warm the heart.”
--Jane Ciabattari, Los Angeles Times Book Review