City of Strangers [Paperback]

A glum gem
--London's Evening Standard

Family secrets, a fateful encounter, and the strangeness of life in the city: a first novel of polished perfection which recalls Ian McEwan's Saturday.

The life of Paul Metzger, a writer, is in disrepair. Mid-thirties, divorced, underachieving. A mid-winter Sunday in New York sees him traversing the city to visit three people: an elder half-brother who wants little to do with him; a disgraced, dying father, once infamous as a Nazi sympathizer, whose meagre estate has pitted his sons against one another; and an ex-wife whom Paul still loves.

But it is a fourth, unplanned and violent encounter that sets in motion the events of City of Strangers and changes more than one life forever. In a city of many millions of souls, Paul experiences the dawning realisation that he is being followed, and that his watcher means him harm. The story that unfolds over the course of the next week is one of a family inalterably fractured by its past, of a man who refuses to believe that what's done can't be undone, and of a world that catastrophically insists otherwise.

City of Strangers is a stunning debut by a gifted young writer, an unforgettable exploration of how we live now, of the city's latent violence, of masculinity, and of the chance encounters upon which lives turn.

Paul Metzger's life is in a state of disrepair; a writer is in his mid-thirties, he is divorced and underachieving. One winter afternoon he travels into New York to visit three people; an elder half-brother who wants little to do with him, a disgraced, dying father, once infamous as a Nazi sympathiser, and an ex-wife whom Paul still loves. But Paul soon realises that he is being watched, and it is this fourth, unplanned and violent, encounter that will change more than one life, forever.

Ian MacKenzie graduated from Harvard in 2004. He lives in Brooklyn.