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4.0 

Cahokia Jazz

By Francis Spufford
Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford digital book - Fable

Publisher 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).

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31 Reviews

4.0
Slightly Smiling Face“This was a random pickup from my public library and I'm glad that I did pick it up. This is absolutely right up my alley and every way shape and form of a noir detective mystery book. From the atmospheric world, to the characters, To the poetic prose and attention to detail this book was an absolute hit from me. This is an alternate history set in the 1920s with some pretty heavy dark things of the times that history was rich and deep and also dark and engaging. If you're someone who enjoys noir classics and detective mysteries this is something I highly recommend to check out.”

About Francis Spufford

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 of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. It was followed by The Child That Books BuiltBackroom Boys, and most recently, Unapologetic. But with Red Plenty in 2012 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. 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.

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