A literary tour de force, a magnificent chronicle of a remarkable era and a place of dreams

In a stunning work of imagination and memory, author Kevin Baker brings to mesmerizing life a vibrant, colorful, thrilling, and dangerous New York City in the earliest years of the twentieth century. A novel breathtaking in its scope and ambition, it is the epic saga of newcomers drawn to the promise of America--gangsters and laborers, hucksters and politicians, radicals, reformers, murderers, and sideshow oddities--whose stories of love, revenge, and tragedy interweave and shine in...

They came by boat from a starving land--and by the Underground Railroad from Southern chains--seeking refuge in a crowded, filthy corner of hell at the bottom of a great metropolis. But in the terrible July of 1863, the poor and desperate of Paradise Alley would face a new catastrophe--as flames from the war that was tearing America in two reached out to set their city on fire.

The Rev. Jonah Dove is the son of a legendary Harlem minister, and a man troubled in both mind and spirit. He feels himself unworthy and incapable of taking up the burden of running his church from the larger-than-life figure who is his father. He is haunted both by his own, shameful history of "passing" as a white man in college, and by the prospects for his people in the harsh, new, racist age he fears the world is entering. Malcolm Little -- better known as Malcom X -- is a teenage hustler from Lansing, Michigan by way of Boston, a young man on the make, trying always to be something...