City of strangers

Faith, family, and the weight of history intersect in this remarkable debut from a rising literary talentA 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.