Description: * Winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History * Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction * Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, The New York Times, Fresh Air (top 10 pick), NPR, the Los Angeles Times (top 15 pick), The Washington Post, and more!
The bestselling and award-winning author of Golden Hill delivers a "dazzling" (Los Angeles Times), "smoky, brooding noir set in the 1920s" (Slate) that reimagines how American history would be different if, instead of being decimated, indigenous populations had thrived. Like his earlier novel Golden Hill, Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz inhabits a different version of America, now through the lens of a subtly altered 1920s--a fully imagined world filled with fog, cigarette smoke, dubious motives, danger, and dark deeds. In the main character of hard-boiled detective Joe Barrow, we have a hero of truly epic proportions, a troubled soul to fall in love with as you are swept along by a propulsive and brilliantly twisty plot. One snowy night at the end of winter, Barrow and his partner find a body on the roof of a skyscraper. Down below, streetcar bells ring, factory whistles blow, Americans drink in speakeasies and dance to the tempo of modern times. But this is Cahokia, the ancient indigenous city beside the Mississippi living on as a teeming industrial metropolis containing people of every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. Yet that corpse on the roof will spark a week of drama in which this altered world will spill its secrets and be brought, against a soundtrack of jazz clarinets and wailing streetcars, either to destruction or rebirth. "Atmospheric...many of us will recognize our own held-breath bafflement, caught, as we are, on the darkling plain of our own barely believable times" (The Washington Post).Brief description: Francis Spufford began as the author of four highly praised books of nonfiction. His first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers Guild Award for Best Nonfiction Book, the Banff Mountain Book Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. It was followed by The Child That Books Built, Backroom Boys, and most recently, Unapologetic. But with Red Plenty, he switched to the novel. Golden Hill won multiple literary prizes on both sides of the Atlantic; Light Perpetual was longlisted for the Booker Prize; and Cahokia Jazz was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. In England, he is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Review Quotes: "Dazzling . . . an intricate, suspenseful and moving story that rises from the mists of America's prehistory and morphs into an alternate version of America's story. . . . [Spufford] keeps his engine running with action and intrigue, romance and suspense, and his sense of place is spellbinding . . . Cahokia Jazz is an audacious work of the imagination by an author powerfully steeped in mythmaking." --The Los Angeles Times
"Atmospheric . . . Spufford, one of our most powerful writers of wayward historical fiction, sets his book--a hard-boiled crime story--in an America that's recognizable yet disquietingly not. . . . In the compelling character of Barrow--a mostly decent man trying to make sense of a fallen 'what if' world--many of us will recognize our own held-breath bafflement, caught, as we are, on the darkling plain of our own barely believable times." --Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post "A smoky, brooding noir set in the 1920s, but not an entirely recognizable 1920s . . . Cahokia Jazz combines the intricate plot and burly action of an old-fashioned hardboiled detective novel with Spufford's dreamy, lustrous prose, summoning an irresistible city lost to time and chance." --Laura Milller, Slate "Cahokia Jazz is a love letter--not just to an America that might have been, but to a national mythology that's very much alive in the world as it is." --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal "In this stylishly drawn mystery novel, the tropes of noir--among them a hardboiled detective with an artist's soul, a powerful woman with a terrible secret, and a journalist chasing the story of a lifetime--appear in an alternative Jazz Age." --New Yorker