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Elizabeth Gaffney’s magnificent,
Dickensian Metropolis captures the splendor and violence
of America’s greatest city in the years after the Civil
War, as young immigrants climb out of urban chaos and into
the American dream.
On a freezing night in the middle of winter, Gaffney’s
nameless hero 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 across the Atlantic, 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 young woman.
Buffeted by the forces of fate, hate, luck, and passion, our
hero struggles to build a life–just to stay alive–in
a country that at first held so much promise for him.
Epic in sweep, Metropolis follows our hero from his
arrival in New York harbor through his experiences in Barnum’s
circus, the criminal underground, and the building of the
Brooklyn Bridge, and on to a life in Brooklyn that is at once
unique and poignantly emblematic of the American experience.
In a novel that is wonderfully written, rich in suspense,
vivid historical detail, breathtakingly paced, Elizabeth Gaffney
captures the wonder and magic of a rambunctious city in a
time of change. Metropolis marks a superb fiction debut.
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.
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