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Faith, family, and the weight of history intersect in this remarkable debut from a rising literary talent.
A cold, gray Sunday dawns on New York City to find Paul Metzger trudging through the winter streets to visit his past. He goes first to see his estranged, decades-older half-brother; then his dying father, whose notorious early life still haunts his children; and finally the ex-wife he cannot help but continue to love. But a fourth encounter—violent, unexpected—sets in motion a chain of events that will forever change Paul's life, as well as the family he's struggled so long to understand.
Ian MacKenzie's stirring and lyrical debut is a story of a family inalterably fractured by its past, of a man who refuses to believe that what is done cannot be undone, and of a world that insists—catastrophically, in the end—otherwise.
"Starred Review. A novel as grim as it is extraordinary ... his visceral narrative, powered by taut prose and braced with sturdy philosophical and psychological underpinnings, is a winner." - Publishers Weekly
"Nothing about Ian MacKenzie's City of Strangers tips the reader that this complex and riveting work is a first novel by an author not yet 30 .... MacKenzie handles the questions of obligation and responsibility among his characters with great skill, which elevates this novel to an impressive literary level." - Stan Hynds, Publishers Weekly Galley Talk
This information about City of Strangers was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ian MacKenzie graduated from Harvard in 2004. City of Strangers is his first novel.
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