Colson Whitehead: Cool Machine

Set against the backdrop of a New York City emerging from financial ruin and into Reagan-era predatory capitalism, Whitehead’s final instalment of his Harlem trilogy brings the saga to a close.

Successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.

With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below.

In a dazzling display of imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to Sugar Hill, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.

Whitehead is a number-one New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian-British author. Her novels, Curandera and Butterfly Fish, and short story collections, Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch, have won and been nominated for multiple awards. Her collection of hybrid personal essays, Quixotic Fissures, is published by Dialogue Books. She is the director and founder of Black to the Future festival.