A sharp, searching novel of an American son and the family he left behind — from a writer of rare breadth and human insight.

My Cold War is a critically acclaimed debut novel of extraordinary depth and range : the story of a man's alienation and attempts at reconnection with his family, and a rich exploration of the thorny implications of American popular culture.

At its center is John Delano, a professor of Cold War Studies and successful mass-market historian a la Stephen Ambrose or Ken Burns. Raised by an awkward, embittered father and a frustrated mother in a Levittown–style suburb on Long Island, Delano has made a name for himself as a gimmicky interpreter of Cold War America, a controversial but popular repackager of events like the JFK assassination for those who lived through them without noticing.

And yet, as the novel opens, Delano has reached an impasse: during a crisis of confidence, he shelves a major new book project in favor of a quest to drive to the Midwest and seek out his estranged younger brother. But when the trip ends in a sobering discovery that his brother has led a life of desperate transience, grasping at straws and scapegoats, he undergoes an epiphany that propels him back to the newly sacred ground where he and his brother were raised.

Long recognized as a writer of exceptional vision and unflinching candor, Tom Piazza has crafted a novel full of incident and argument, a book that speaks with depth and range about what it has meant to be American in our time.

"Piazza's journey down memory lane is enlivened by his witty take on competitive academia, and deepened by his poignant tale of a family broken, it may be, beyond repair." Booklist

"Layers of delight are to be found in short-story writer Tom Piazza's first novel....Delano may be a confused character, but Piazza is not a confusing writer. My Cold War is written clearly and conversationally." USA Today

"This is an incisive portrait of a man, his troubled family and their place in history." Publishers Weekly

"Intelligent, sharply observed, often very funny — the portraits of various trendy academics are a scream — but never gets beyond generic Baby Boomer angst." Kirkus Reviews

"[T]his dark, personal, sadly introspective work succeeds in bringing to life the troubled main character. Recommended." Library Journal

My Cold War is the story of John Delano — history professor, author, and brilliant fraud. At a small New England college he lectures on what others call "History McNuggets" — gimmicky glimpses of the "surfaces" of our collective past. But as he struggles to write a major book on the Cold War, his life begins to fall apart. Revisiting the streets of 1960s suburbia, the JFK assassination, the Summer of Love, and other iconic moments, Delano begins to confront the personal history that he has kept buried for years. A trip into the heartland to reconnect with his estranged brother changes everything for Delano and forms the powerful, surprising climax of this extraordinary first novel.

Tom Piazza, a longtime resident of New Orleans, is the author of seven previous works of fiction and nonfiction, including the widely acclaimed novel My Cold War and the recent Understanding Jazz. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, he has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Oxford American, and many other publications. He is the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship in Fiction, and he won a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey.