Cahokia Jazz

A thrilling tale of murder and mystery in a city where history has run a little differently -- from the best-selling author of Golden Hill.In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper.It's 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. But in this 1922, things are a little different. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient indigenous city of Cahokia has lived on. It is now a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week of drama that will spill the secrets of this altered world, and bring it, against a soundtrack of jazz clarinets and wailing streetcars, either to destruction or rebirth.The multiple award-winning Francis Spufford returns, with a lovingly-created, richly pleasure-giving, epically-scaled, wise-cracking, bone-breaking novel set in a golden age of wicked entertainments.

Francis Spufford is the author of five highly-praised works of non-fiction, most frequently described by reviewers as either 'bizarre' or 'brilliant', and usually as both. His debut novel Golden Hill won the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award and the British Book Awards Debut Novel of the Year. His second novel, Light Perpetual, was awarded the 2022 Encore Award and longlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and lives near Cambridge.

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