2024 Dragon Award for Best Alternate History Novel (nominee)
2024 HWA Gold Crown Award (shortlist)
2024 Sidewise Award for Best Long-Form Alternate History
* 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, TheNew York Times, NPR, TheWashington 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).
Genre: Science Fiction
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).
Genre: Science Fiction
Praise for this book
"The book is itself Cahokia jazz; the play of possibilities beyond the linear progression of the tune we all already know, that goes to wild places and then winds back, beautifully, heartbreakingly, to echo the notes of where it started." - Jo Baker
"Francis Spufford has discovered a new riff on a favourite tune, and in exploring it has created something wholly unique. Cahokia Jazz is extraordinary." - Mick Herron
"Francis Spufford is a literary sorcerer with one of the great imaginations of our time. When a new book lands, I drop everything and start reading. Cahokia Jazz takes us to an America that wasn't... a wilder, richer, altogether more enchanting America. Bullets and beatings provide the percussion to Spufford's hothouse jazz noir, while hope and heartbreak do a dizzying, drunken foxtrot together. I can't remember the last time suspense and spiritual longing were so tightly braided together in a single novel. A masterpiece." - Joe Hill
"Francis Spufford has discovered a new riff on a favourite tune, and in exploring it has created something wholly unique. Cahokia Jazz is extraordinary." - Mick Herron
"Francis Spufford is a literary sorcerer with one of the great imaginations of our time. When a new book lands, I drop everything and start reading. Cahokia Jazz takes us to an America that wasn't... a wilder, richer, altogether more enchanting America. Bullets and beatings provide the percussion to Spufford's hothouse jazz noir, while hope and heartbreak do a dizzying, drunken foxtrot together. I can't remember the last time suspense and spiritual longing were so tightly braided together in a single novel. A masterpiece." - Joe Hill
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