City on Fire
Now an Apple TV Series
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3.0 • 11 Ratings
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
NOW AN APPLE TV SERIES
'Extraordinary...dazzling... a sprawling, generous, warm-hearted epic of 1970s New York' Observer
Midnight, New Year's Eve, 1976. Nine lives are about to be changed forever.
Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, heirs to one of New York's greatest fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by the punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter and his idealistic neighbour - and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park on New Year's Eve.
Then, on July 13th, 1977, the lights go out.
'Dazzling' Washington Post
'Heart-stopping' New York Times
'Addictive' Independent
'Extraordinary' Observer
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Thanks to this staggeringly creative debut novel, author Garth Risk Hallberg has been compared to Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. Hallberg's writing is cutting-edge, but his moving and mesmerising portrait of New York City in the ‘70s harkens back to 19th-century classics. With its Dickensian cast of characters and plot twists, City on Fire captures a gritty era at every level, from old money to the downtown punk scene—and every setting rings true.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hallberg's maniacally detailed, exhaustingly clever depiction of 1970s New York is packed with urban angst, intellectual energy, and sinister pitfalls, much like the city it evokes. This epic of drugs, sex, and rock and roll combines fiction and new journalistic accounts of real events, with a character's typed manuscript drafts (spill marks included), hand-written diaries, notebooks, photographs, cartoons, drawings, homework, and personal correspondence. A cast of characters drawn from all social strata features William Hamilton-Sweeney, artist and sometime heroin addict, once heir to a fortune, once lead guitarist for the post-humanist rock band Ex Post Facto; and Sam Cicciaro, the girl everyone finds irresistible, discovered half-dead in Central Park by William's lover, Mercer. The search to identify Sam's attacker is one of several story lines tying the ambitious work together; another is Mercer's attempt, propelled by William's sister, Regan, to bring William back into the family fold as their father's business collapses and troubles in the family mount. Charlie, an alienated teenager who becomes a rock band groupie, falls for Sam. Meanwhile Richard Kosgroth, veteran journalist and Capote wannabe, interviews Sam's father, New York's fireworks king. Seventies survivors will not be surprised when city residents come together during the '77 blackout. Readers wishing to wallow in cultural trivia will find much to savor in Hallberg's all-encompassing, occasionally overwritten effort, but others will be left to wonder how so much energy could generate so little light.
Customer Reviews
Plunking awful
Not normally one to write reviews as I don't have the skills to portray how I feel.
I eagerly anticipated the release to this book after hearing about it on Simon Mayos Radio 2 show.
But I was soon let down.
I'm halfway through this book and still waiting for it to get going (thank god I'm stuck in hospital, otherwise this book wouldn't have got this far.)
It's so bad I'd rather read information booklets about diagnosis.
The book starts slowly portraying the vast amount of characters, of which it doesn't do well, they're all portrayed to be dreadfully one dimensional.
The chapters drag on for what seems to be the time this books set (1970's) to the date of release.
Each chapter focuses on one character, but by the time it 'full wheels' back to said, you've forgotten what was happening to them several chapters earlier, part because of the length, part because nothing happened in previous chapters that makes you want to remember.
Looking for positives in this book is like looking for a reason to start reading again... There's a few good 'twists' but compared to other authors 'twists' there's no comparison.
The negatives to find are as easy as breathing, 'The cat in the hat' contains better sentences, the chapters to long, the story's hard to follow and the characters are as interesting as the ant farm I had as a child, after the ants had all died and the interludes stop the little flow this book has.
Looking on google this book took 7 years to write, well it'll take 7 years to finish.
In short I'm going to look for something to do before I'm left with no other option than to carry on reading.
Sprawling, disappointing
Starts well, goes nowhere