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City on Fire

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City on Fire

By: Garth Risk Hallberg
Narrated by: Alex McKenna, Bronson Pinchot, MacLeod Andrews, Paul Michael, Rebecca Lowman, Tristan Morris
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NEW YORK. 1977. BE THERE WHEN IT EXPLODES.

It’s New Year’s Eve, 1976, and New York is a city on the edge. As midnight approaches, a blizzard sets in – and amidst the fireworks, an unmistakable sound rings out across Central Park. Gunshots. Two of them.

The search for the shooter will bring together a rich cast of New Yorkers. From the reluctant heirs to one of the city's greatest fortunes, to a couple of Long Island kids drawn to the punk scene downtown. From the newly arrived and enchanted, to those so sick of the city they want to burn it to the ground. All these lives are connected to one another – and to the life that still clings to that body in the park. Whether they know it or not, they are bound up in the same story – a story where history and revolution, love and art, crime and conspiracy are all packed into a single shell, ready to explode.

Then, on July 13th, 1977, the lights go out in New York City.

 Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction New York
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Critic Reviews

Extraordinary…dazzling… a sprawling, generous, warm-hearted epic of 1970s New York
Staggering…gloriously ambitious
Exciting, imaginative and perfectly paced
You’re soon zipping through Hallberg’s vividly realised New York like a child discovering Hogwarts for the first time
This book felt to me like a DVD boxset, in that each chapter was so short that I’d find myself reading just one more, just one more, and then find myself still reading an hour later. I love this book: this is definitely for me the best book we’ve done on the Book Club this year.
Once I started Hallberg's addictive soap opera shuttling between uptown and downtown Manhattan, I couldn't stop ... This is The Goldfinch with a safety pin through its beak. (James Kidd)
A tour de force
There is prose in City on Fire as transporting as any you’re likely to see in a book in the next 10 years
City on Fire is an extraordinary performance. Radiating youthful bravado that will make older authors sniff with contempt (or sweat with envy), Hallberg has conjured what he calls the “muchness” of New York City in the late 1970s … A novel whose Whitmanesque arms embrace an entire city of lovers and strivers, saints and killers … Dazzling (Ron Charles)
The hype is justified: this is the year’s must-read book
All stars
Most relevant
Garth Risk Hallberg has achieved with his first novel what any literary author strives to achieve in their lifetime. 'City On Fire' is not so much a book with a centralized plot as it is (as it is novelistically intended) an experiential process. Where the reader might search for signposts pointing the way to the book's conclusion - hoping for closure and a satisfying fulfillment of the stories they've been exposed to - Hallberg offers them something that is really quite 'else'.
The novel meanders through time and a wide array of consciousnesses, depicted them in a myriad of ways and styles, urges the reader to forget that they are creations and rather accept them as interpretations of reality.
My only qualm with the audio rendition of Hallberg's work is that it cannot capture the visceral experience of the printed process. The book is layered with inserts and layout disruptions that my it a real visual treat. I was also a little frustrated by the voice given to Sam as I felt that it didn't capture the way I'd imagined her - this is a personal criticism rather than anything grander because that section is still very well read.
Regardless, this is an epic piece of writing that deserves your time (and it will require it). Hallberg has quite possibly written a true modern classic - and I say that on the grounds that I have enjoyed this more than I did Donna Tartt's 'The Goldfinch'.

A modern classic?

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couldn't finish this, the changing format is a difficult one to tackle in audio form, but i didn't finish the hardcopy either. it just fell flat for me. and thats a lot of audio book to fall flat!

not as engaging as I'd hoped

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