City on Fire

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A mystery that reverberates through families, friendships, and the corridors of power in New York and "captures the city’s dangerous, magnetic allure" (The New York Times). • Streaming now on Apple TV+

“As close to a great American novel as this century has produced.” —Stephen King

New York City, 1976. Meet Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city’s great fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by downtown’s punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter and his idealistic neighbor—and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park on New Year’s Eve. 

When the blackout of July 13, 1977, plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives will be changed forever. City on Fire is an unforgettable novel about love and betrayal and forgiveness, about art and truth and rock ’n’ roll: about what people need from each other in order to live—and about what makes the living worth doing in the first place.

Garth Risk Hallberg's first novel, City on Fire, was a New York Times and international bestseller, has been translated into 17 languages, and was named one of the best books of 2015 by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Vogue. He is also the author of a novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family. His short stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train, and Best New American Voices 2008, and he has written critical essays for The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Millions, and Slate. A two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's award for Excellence in Reviewing, he lives in New York with his wife and children.