City of Strangers

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.

“A novel as grim as it is extraordinary . . . MacKenzie sets up a New York rampant with alienation and misunderstanding, and his visceral narrative, powered by taut prose and braced with sturdy philosophical and psychological underpinnings, is a winner.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“City of Strangers, the excellent new novel by Ian MacKenzie . . . possesses a relentless, straight-ahead momentum, a powerful surge of pure storytelling oomph . . . Most memorable about City of Strangers, though, is its hectic urban rhythm, the shock and clatter of New York City at ground level, as rendered by MacKenzie’s prose. The stop-and-start syncopation of his chapters turns the entire novel into its own mini-city, complete with violence and beauty, sorrow and wisdom, chaos and clarity.” — Chicago Tribune

“MacKenzie’s debut novel reminded me a lot of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy . . . MacKenzie straddles the line between thriller and internal examination of a man’s failings, and his ability to do so establishes him as a young writer of serious talent and future.” — Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind (Pick of the Week)

“The New York of City of Strangers is a lonely, violent place, shadowed by failure and the sins of the past . . . Brilliant writing on every page.” — Stewart O’Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster and A Prayer for the Dying

“Nothing about this complex and riveting novel tips the reader to the fact that it is a first novel by an author not yet 30. MacKenzie’s ideas suggest experience and depth and the writing is solidly assured . . . Readers who loved Ian McEwan’s Saturday should snap up this terrific novel.” — Stan Hynds, Northshire Books, Manchester, VT

“A bleak, beautiful novel . . . one part Albert Camus, one part Philip Roth, and one part Martin Scorsese.” — David Abrams, The Barnes & Noble Review

“An auspicious debut novel, a book that lives up to the term ‘literary thriller.’’ — Largehearted Boy

“Lyric and chilling.” — The Star-Ledger