Metropolis - by Elizabeth Gaffney (Paperback)

About the Book

A brilliant novel of epic proportions, "Metropolis" tells the story of a young man's struggle to find love and create a life in late 19th-century New York.

Book Synopsis

On a freezing night in the middle of a New York winter, a young immigrant is suddenly awakened by a fire in P. T. Barnum's stable, where he works and sleeps, and soon finds himself at the center of a citywide arson investigation. Determined to clear his name and realize the dreams that inspired his hazardous voyage to America, he will change his identity many times, find himself mixed up with one of the city's toughest and most enterprising gangs, and fall in love with a smart, headstrong, and beautiful woman. Buffeted by the forces of fate, hate, luck, and passion, our hero struggles to build a life-and just to stay alive-on an epic journey that is at once unique and poignantly emblematic of the American experience.

Review Quotes

"Rewarding . . . vivid tableaus and high drama . . . immigrant dreams and desires on the scrappy streets of Five Points."
-The New York Times

"Engaged with history, artfully structured, told with dashing wit . . . full of passions and perils, desire and deceit . . . Metropolis teems with imagined life, as a good page-turner should."
-San Jose Mercury News

"Brawny, old-school storytelling . . . a novel as strong and heady as the brew [Gaffney's] rakes and roustabouts swill by the pint."
-Newsweek

"Metropolis is more than a literary page-turner; it is also a coming-of-age story for a young and strapping New York."
-Vanity Fair

"Engrossing . . . fraught with suspense."
-Elle

About the Author

ELIZABETH GAFFNEY is an advisory editor of The Paris Review. In addition to teaching writing at New York University, she has translated from German The Arbogast Case (Thomas Hettche), The Pollen Room (Zoë Jenny), and Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany (Ika Hugel-Marshall). Her short fiction has appeared in North American Review, Colorado Review, Brooklyn Review, Mississippi Review, The Reading Room, and Epiphany. Metropolis is her first novel. To learn more about Elizabeth Gaffney, please visit her website at www.elizabethgaffney.net