Cool Machine

Rejoice: the final instalment of the Harlem Trilogy is hereTELEGRAPH

From the #1 New York Timesbestselling author and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner ColsonWhitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings 1980s New York to vivid, unforgettable life.

1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furnitures Dealer of the Month. When the banks wont give his beloved wife, Elizabeth, a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.

1983. To some, Carneys friend and partner in crime Pepper is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, hes feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, hes plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether youre uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence - Pepper is a native speaker.

1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddies death, he has a chance to rescue Freddies son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security hes spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.

With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to Sugar Hill, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whiteheads vivid characters, its whats below the surface that reveals the truth.

Colson Whiteheads trilogy ends with a bang... a street-level social history of modern New York told through fences, gangsters, hookers, politicians, landlords, developers and dreamers - a Dickensian gallery of rogues through whom an entire metropolis comes into view The Sunday Times

Whiteheads gift for description and denigration is as potent as everINDEPENDENT, Novel of the month