Brooklyn Crime Novel

Brooklyn Crime Novel is a kaleidoscopic tour de force of a quarter of a city and the humanity it contains, exploring how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable.

Format: Hardback
Length: 384 pages
Publication date: 02 November 2023
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Brooklyn, a vibrant and diverse borough in New York City, has a rich history of crime and violence that has been documented over the years. In 1978, two 14-year-old white boys were caught creating dubious art by using a hacksaw to cut multiple quarters into pieces. A child who had just bought ice cream from a Mr. Softee truck witnessed a daylight sidewalk shooting in 1979. A couple of blocks over, a kid was caught trying to shoplift an adult magazine from a Puerto Rican hole-in-the-wall. A Black teenager and his white friends squared up to a rival Italian gang over the right to play hockey in the street. In 1977, a white kid craters a baseball right in the center of a Cuban guy's windscreen. And so it goes.

On the streets of Brooklyn, the faces of the children change, but the patterns remain the same: sex, boredom, friendship, violence, and a million daily crimes committed, some small, some unimaginably big. However, the real action is away from the streets, played out behind closed doors by parents, cops, renovators, landlords, gentrifiers, those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws, and those who award this neighborhood its name and control its shifting demographics.

Across the decades, buildings are developed and homes are razed; communities come in and muscle other communities out; the past haunts the present, and perspectives change, so that perpetrators sometimes become victims, and victims sometimes become the worst criminals of all.

Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force of a quarter of a city and the humanity it contains, and an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we've made.

Weight: 650g
Dimension: 162 x 243 x 37 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781805460404
Edition number: Main