Crook Manifesto

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Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.

It’s 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amid this collective nervous breakdown, furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It’s strictly the straight and narrow for him–until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter, May, and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated–and deadly.

1973. The counterculture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant–Pepper, Carney’s endearingly violent partner in crime. It’s getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook–to their regret.

1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July Fourth ad he can live with. (“Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!”), while his wife, Elizabeth, is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A. and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney’s tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent and the utterly corrupted.

Crook Manifesto is a darkly funny tale of a city under siege, but also a sneakily searching portrait of the meaning of family. Colson Whitehead’s kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem is sure to stand as one of the all-time great evocations of a place and a time.A Best Book of the Year
The New York Times • The Washington Post • TIME • NPR • BookPage

“Crook Manifesto gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people . . . Whitehead bends language. He makes sinuous the sounds of a city and its denizens pushing against the boundaries. He can be mordantly funny . . . At other times, Whitehead gives his characters the quiet and room to issue forth the sound of such deep regret and resignation.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Both deceptively substantive and sneakily funny . . . Whitehead has always had a sharp instinct for the workings of culture . . . Whitehead’s New York of the ‘70s is a fully realized universe down to the most meticulous details, from the constant sirens and bodega drug fronts to a sweltering, abandoned biscuit factory . . . These books are as resonant and finely observed as anything Whitehead has written.” —The Los Angeles Times

“Two-time Pulitzer-winning author Whitehead shows no sign of resting on his laurels. Crook Manifesto continues the brilliantly realised sequence that began with Harlem Shuffle, intricately depicting cultural history and family drama with the compelling energy of a crime thriller and the sharp wit of social satire. . . In ambition and scope, in the way the intimate is so deftly weaved with the epic, one is also reminded of Balzac. Whitehead has embarked on a great comédie humaine of his own.” —The Guardian

“Whitehead has . . . injected beauty and grace into [the noir genre’s] often too-predictable and clichéd conventions. . . . Novel writing at its best. Bigger and better . . . than anything Whitehead has written before.” —The Washington Post

“Whitehead’s ironic, biting humor is laced throughout Crook Manifesto . . . [with] blazing wit, striking cultural intelligence, and special storytelling talent.” —The Boston Globe

“Fierce and glorious … Sentence by brilliant, funny sentence, a masterpiece.” —People

“Crook Manifesto thrums with Whitehead’s singular prose—droll, knowing, half-smile-half-smirk, not a word amiss.” —Oprah Daily

“Whitehead’s crime series is one of the most enjoyable streaks in recent fiction. When so much celebrated contemporary literature is hobbled by angst and introspection, it’s a reminder of agile, more old-fashioned pleasures. Strange to admit, given that it involves murder, maimings and unrepentant malfeasance, but Crook Manifesto gave me something I had missed in recent reading: joy.” —The Telegraph

“Whitehead’s gift for sudden, often grotesque eruptions of violence is omnipresent, so much so that you almost feel squeamish to recognize this book for the accomplished, streamlined, and darkly funny comedy of manners it is . . . It’s not just crime fiction at its craftiest, but shrewdly rendered social history.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“In this stylish social novel for the twenty-first century, Whitehead soars to new heights.” —Esquire

“Crook Manifesto outdoes its predecessor. . . . Whitehead’s deft genre stylings are underpinned by a grasp of urbanism that is one of the finest of anyone working in crime fiction today.” —The Straits Times

“The interplay between context and character makes this sequel soar.” —BookPageCOLSON WHITEHEAD is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.US

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