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Crook Manifesto
1971, New York City. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is going bankrupt, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney is trying to keep his head down, his business up and his life straight. But then he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up an old police contact, who wants favours in return. For Ray, staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.
1973. The old ways are being overthrown by the thriving counterculture, but Pepper, Carney's enduringly violent partner in crime, is a constant. In these difficult times, Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem, finding himself in a world of Hollywood stars 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, while the country gears up for the Bicentennial. Carney is trying to come up with a celebratory July 4th advertisement he can actually live with, while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire seriously injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it, navigating a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent and the utterly corrupt.
Review
Whitehead's Crook Manifesto is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There's an element of crime here, certainly, but as in Whitehead's previous books, genre isn't the point . . . gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people ― New York Times Book Review
The only living novelist to have won the Pulitzer prize for fiction twice, for The Underground Railroad in 2016 and The Nickel Boys in 2019...Resilience and reinvention are qualities that Whitehead has poured into Ray Carney, the furniture salesman and middleman for stolen goods at the heart of his hugely enjoyable 2021 heist novel Harlem Shuffle and now its follow-up, Crook Manifesto. Part of a proposed trilogy set in Harlem in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the stories combine the family man turned crook dynamic of Breaking Bad with the hardboiled humour of crime novelists such as Chester Himes and Elmore Leonard. The blend of social realism, melodrama and farce prompted another comparison in my mind: Whitehead is fast becoming the Dickens of black American life ― The Sunday 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. -- Jake Arnott ― Guardian
Sly plotting, vibrant characterisation, astute social history - this novel has it all -- Hephzibah Anderson ― Mail on Sunday
Fast, fun, ribald and pulpy, with a touch of Quentin Tarantino in its deadpan dialogue and don't-take-this-too-seriously tone ― Sunday Times
Carney remains an appealing, amoral hero: a not-quite-innocent. Whitehead's New York, too, is masterfully characterful. It has intelligence, wiles, predatory cunning....And it hands down great, blunt judgements...For my money, Whitehead's crime series is one of the most enjoyable streaks in recent fiction...Crook Manifesto gave me something I had missed in recent reading: joy ― Telegraph
About the Author
Colson Whitehead is a multi-award winning and bestselling author whose works include The Nickel Boys, The Underground Railroad, The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt and a collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. He is one of only four novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice and is a recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. For The Underground Railroad, Whitehead won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a second time for The Nickel Boys, which also won the George Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kirkus Prize. The Underground Railroad has been adapted as an Amazon Prime TV series, produced and directed by the Academy Award winning director Barry Jenkins, and was broadcast in 2021. He lives with his family in New York City.
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