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." In City of Strangers, Ian MacKenzie tells, in direct, beautiful, and convincing language, a story that examines the surface tensions and deeper sources of pressure in today's uncertain world. City of Strangers exhibits a maturity well beyond the writer's years. He is a talent to watch."
-Uzodinma Iweala, author of the national bestseller Beasts of No NationIan MacKenzie graduated from Harvard in 2004 and lives in Brooklyn, New York. City of Strangers is his first novel.