A brilliant novel of epic proportions, "Metropolis" tells the story of a young man's struggle to find love and create a life in late 19th-century New York.

“Rewarding . . . vivid tableaus and high drama . . . immigrant dreams and desires on the scrappy streets of Five Points.”

The New York Times

“Engaged with history, artfully structured, told with dashing wit . . . full of passions and perils, desire and deceit . . . Metropolis teems with imagined life, as a good page-turner should.”

San Jose Mercury News

“Brawny, old-school storytelling . . . a novel as strong and heady as the brew [Gaffney’s] rakes and roustabouts swill by the pint.”

Newsweek

“Metropolis is more than a literary page-turner; it is also a coming-of-age story for a young and strapping New York.”

Vanity Fair

“Engrossing . . . fraught with suspense.”

Elle

Elizabeth Gaffney's magnificent, Dickensian "Metropolis captures the splendor and violence of America's greatest city in the years after the Civil War, as young immigrants climb out of urban chaos and into the American dream.

On a freezing night in the middle of winter, Gaffney's nameless hero is suddenly awakened by a fire in P. T. Barnum's stable, where he works and sleeps, and soon finds himself at the center of a citywide arson investigation.

Determined to clear his name and realize the dreams that inspired his hazardous voyage across the Atlantic, he will change his identity many times, find himself mixed up with one of the city's toughest and most enterprising gangs, and fall in love with a smart, headstrong, and beautiful young woman. Buffeted by the forces of fate, hate, luck, and passion, our hero struggles to build a life-just to stay alive-in a country that at first held so much promise for him.

Epic in sweep, "Metropolis follows our hero from his arrival in New York harbor through his experiences in Barnum's circus, the criminal underground, and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and on to a life in Brooklyn that is at once unique and poignantly emblematic of the American experience. In a novel that is wonderfully written, rich in suspense, vivid historical detail, breathtakingly paced, Elizabeth Gaffney captures the wonder and magic of a rambunctious city in a time of change. "Metropolis marks a superb fiction debut.

"From the Hardcover edition.

ELIZABETH GAFFNEY is an advisory editor of The Paris Review. In addition to teaching writing at New York University, she has translated from German The Arbogast Case (Thomas Hettche), The Pollen Room (Zoë Jenny), and Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany (Ika Hugel-Marshall). Her short fiction has appeared in North American Review, Colorado Review, Brooklyn Review, Mississippi Review, The Reading Room, and Epiphany. Metropolis is her first novel. To learn more about Elizabeth Gaffney, please visit her website at www.elizabethgaffney.net

From the Hardcover edition.