City on Fire

A big-hearted, boundary-vaulting novel that heralds a remarkable new talent: set in 1970s New York, it is a story outsized in its generosity, warmth, and ambition, its deep feeling for its characters, and its exuberant imagination.

     The individuals who live within this extraordinary first novel are: Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city's largest 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; his idealistic neighbor; and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park. Their entangled relationships--which stretch from post-Vietnam youth culture to the fiscal crisis, from small-town Georgia to greater L.A.--open up the loneliest-seeming corners of the crowded city. And when the infamous blackout of July 13th, 1977 plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives will be changed forever. A novel about love and betrayal and forgiveness, about art and truth and rock'n'roll, about how the people closest to us are sometimes the hardest to reach--about what it means to be human.

GARTH RISK HALLBERG's stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Slate, Los Angeles Times, and Best New American Voices 2008. His illustrated novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, was nominated for the Believer Book Award. He is 35 years old, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.