Harlem Shuffle
A Novel
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST FOR FICTION * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST FOR FICTION * NAACP IMAGE AWARD FINALIST FOR OUTSTANDING LITERARY WORK--FICTION
From two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead, a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s.
"Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked. . . ."
To his customers and neighbours on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home.
Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger and bigger all the time. See, cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace at the furniture store, Ray doesn't see the need to ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweller downtown who also doesn't ask questions. Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plans to rob the Hotel Theresa--the "Waldorf of Harlem"--and volunteers Ray's services as the fence. The heist doesn't go as planned; they rarely do, after all. Now Ray has to cater to a new clientele, one made up of shady cops on the take, vicious minions of the local crime lord and numerous other Harlem lowlifes.
Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he starts to see the truth about who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?
Harlem Shuffle is driven by an ingeniously intricate plot that plays out in a beautifully recreated Harlem of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. But mostly, it's a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.
About this Author
COLSON WHITEHEAD is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.
Reviews
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
2021 KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST FOR FICTION
2021 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST FOR FICTION
2022 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FINALIST FOR OUTSTANDING LITERARY WORK--FICTION
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 by Publishers Weekly o Kirkus Reviews o The Globe and Mail o Washington Post o The New York Times Book Review o The Guardian o Slate o Boston Globe o Financial Times o NPR o Daily Mail o Town & Country o Barnes and Noble o Amazon o Oprah Daily
"Harlem Shuffle brings Whitehead's unwavering eloquence to a mix of city history, niche hangouts, racial stratification, high hopes and low individuals. All of these are somehow worked into a rich, wild book that could pass for genre fiction. It's much more, but the entertainment value alone should ensure it the same kind of popular success that greeted his last two novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. It reads like a book whose author thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing. . . . A steady, suspenseful churn of events . . . Harlem Shuffle has dialogue that crackles, a final third that nearly explodes, hangouts that invite even if they're Chock Full o' Nuts and characters you won't forget even if they don't stick around for more than a few pages." --Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Whitehead adds another genre to an ever-diversifying portfolio with his first crime novel, and it's a corker. . . . Whitehead delivers a portrait of Harlem in the early '60s, culminating with the Harlem Riot of 1964, that is brushed with lovingly etched detail and features a wonderful panoply of characters who spring to full-bodied life, blending joy, humor, and tragedy. A triumph on every level. . . . Whitehead seems destined for more honors with [this] novel." --Booklist (starred review)
"The best of the best of any year, Whitehead takes us to a Harlem on the verge of social change that no one, as yet, sees coming. The dialogue snaps and crackles and the images flow like, in Whitehead's own words, 'black molasses.' There's hope for a sequel but this one stands on its own." --The Globe and Mail
"Whitehead's latest showcases yet more of his range as a storyteller, as Harlem Shuffle follows a 1960s furniture salesman leading a double life of crime. What ensues is part heist novel and part family drama, all set against the backdrop of Harlem, which the author captures in rich, visceral prose." --TIME
"Harlem Shuffle is a spectacularly pleasurable read, and while it is, of course, literary, it's also a pure, unapologetic crime-fiction page-turner." --Los Angeles Times
"A master of genre-hopping, Whitehead tackles crime fiction in this compelling read about how people justify becoming criminals. Like his recent novels, Whitehead takes a setting in Black America and fully develops it into its own character, in this case, 1960s Harlem. . . . [Whitehead's] gift of bringing historical African American settings to life is a consistent theme, and this one is well worth reading." --BuzzFeed
"Whitehead's writing is snappy and forceful, moving the plot along at a pace that will keep the reader furiously turning the pages. . . . At once a crime novel and a family saga, Harlem Shuffle is a love letter to Harlem and the larger-than-life characters who inhabit it." --Vulture
"Two-time Pulitzer winner Whitehead returns with a sizzling heist novel set in civil rights-era Harlem. . . . It's a superlative story, but the most impressive achievement is Whitehead's loving depiction of a Harlem 60 years gone . . . which lands as detailed and vivid as Joyce's Dublin. Don't be surprised if this one wins Whitehead another major award." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[A] loving homage to noir fiction and nostalgic look at the city that never sleeps. . . . Harlem Shuffle is a wildly entertaining romp. But as you might expect with this two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur genius, Whitehead also delivers a devastating, historically grounded indictment of the separate and unequal lives of Blacks and whites in mid-20th century New York. . . . Twisty . . . [with] countless beautifully written, erudite passages." --Associated Press
"A powerful tale of a man's love for his family and the neighborhood where he lives. And the man at the center of that tale is a devastatingly enjoyable character who has a true gift for words--if not always the smartest actions. . . . Vividly cinematic. . . . Colson Whitehead has a couple of Pulitzers under his belt, along with several other awards celebrating his outstanding novels. Harlem Shuffle is a suspenseful crime thriller that's sure to add to the tally--it's a fabulous novel you must read." --NPR
"At turns funny and grim, Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle . . . poses interesting questions about race and wealth." --BookRiot
"A cool, funny, slyly elegant genre outing that deftly weaves in weightier themes around the edges of a story about crooks and schemers in mid-20th-century New York." --Slate
"A tale of 1960s New York gangsters, rendered with superbly observed, affectionate, page-turning brio. . . . Whether in high literary form or entertaining, page-turner mode, the man is simply incapable of writing a bad book. . . . Whitehead capably fulfils the genre's expectations while gently parodying them. . . . Set 60 years ago, the novel nonetheless has a number of parallels to our time. . . . Whitehead makes it easy for us to live in that period and place, so well rendered is his Harlem." --Ian Williams, author of Disorientation: Being Black in the World, for The Guardian
"The crime caper Harlem Shuffle is a much calmer, shiftier and warmer book; a book that luxuriates in the seedy spaces of late night. . . . Yet this book too is driven by a serious historical purpose, showing us the micro-changes in the landscape of Harlem and the prospects of Black Americans in the North in the 1960s. . . . Had I not known Whitehead was a talented shape-shifter, I--as an outsider to Harlem-- would have believed he had only ever written about this setting. . . . Whitehead's research in Harlem Shuffle feels richly integrated with the story; he knows the people of Harlem in the 1960s; and the people are just that: real people. . . . An American master." --Karan Mahajan, The New York Times
"A warm, involving novel that reveals gradual changes in Harlem, in New York City and in the protagonist himself. . . . In his eminently enjoyable new novel, Mr. Whitehead's various powers have attained something like equilibrium. The humor and flashes of the old-word wizardry are there, as is the philosophical subtext; race . . . is woven inextricably into the background, like subtle but affective film music; and we are made to care about, and root for, the main character." --The Wall Street Journal
"This most eclectic of contemporary masters never repeats himself, and his new novel is as audacious, ingenious, and spellbinding as any of his previous period pieces. . . . Readers will be captivated by a Dickensian array of colorful, idiosyncratic characters, from itchy-fingered gangsters to working-class women with a low threshold for male folly. What's even more impressive is Whitehead's densely layered, intricately woven rendering of New York City in the Kennedy era, a time filled with both the bright promise of greater economic opportunity and looming despair due to the growing heroin plague." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Wildly entertaining. . . . Whitehead also delivers a devastating, historically grounded indictment of the separate and unequal lives of Blacks and whites in mid-20th century New York." --Daily Mail
"Colson Whitehead is perhaps our most protean novelist, shape-shifting with each book, a jack of all trades and master of all. His enthralling, cinematic new work, Harlem Shuffle, capers away from the weightiness of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, both winners of the Pulitzer Prize; here he tweaks a simple heist story to limn enduring conflicts of race and class. . . . Whitehead's evocation of early 1960s Harlem--strewn with double-crosses and double standards, broken glass and broken dreams--is irresistible. . . . While a valentine to a time and place, Harlem Shuffle brilliantly tackles the daunting challenges of any American era." --StarTribune
"Harlem Shuffle is something of a retreat from the seriousness of [The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys]. Set in the early 1960s, it's an homage to the era's hard-boiled crime writers like Chester Himes, Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard. . . . Whitehead, as ever, has a photographic eye for the particulars of the city and its moment in time. . . . The story flies when it focuses on Carney's split personality. He's both an engrossing character and a compelling allegory for the ways a city--and country--are divided yet interlaced." --USA Today
"Set against a backdrop of the 1964 Harlem race riots, looting, gentrification, and corrupt Black capitalists, Harlem Shuffle is a story about property and the vexed relationship that African Americans have with it. Indeed, what is theft for a people who were themselves once property, and for whom their very freedom was the ultimate heist? . . . The murky distinction between legality and illegality sits at the core of Harlem Shuffle. . . . Whitehead employ[s] crime fiction subversively, using the genre against itself to expose the hypocrisies of the justice system, the false moral dictates set by capitalism, and the very fact that America itself was born of a theft that we are all complicit in." --The Atlantic
"A dazzling trip back in time from a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who never stops reinventing himself. . . . Whitehead's Harlem pulses with a vibrant heartbeat. . . . In this page-turning novel about how good people come to justify lives of crime, a master storyteller delivers beautifully rendered people and places." --Esquire
"The prose glistens most dazzlingly. . . . The conviviality of Harlem, brimming with life and sin of all kinds, produces characters who are almost too human--that is, complex and contradictory in the most mundane but familiar ways." --Bookforum
"A brilliant crime novel that doubles as a meditation on the nature of Black geography. . . . So careful is Whitehead's mapping that the novel could double as a script for a walking tour of Harlem, a move that is certainly a nod to the neighbourhood's long status as a destination for white voyeurs. . . . The brilliance of Harlem Shuffle is the way it yanks readers down from the top of the tour bus, away from the high-gloss clubs and cabarets that lured visitors uptown, and onto the sweltering pavement. . . . Whitehead leaves us with the notion that to map Harlem is to follow the perpetually changing routes of its makers and takers." --Financial Times
"With Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead makes his foray into crime fiction, to transportive effect. . . . A meticulous researcher, Whitehead re-creates the Harlem of the late 1950s and early 1960s through sights and sounds, including the music of the era and calls for justice during the 1964 riot. . . . What most grounds the novel in its setting, perhaps more than the rich historical details, are the characters: Harlem natives and transplants; strivers and schemers; the straight and the crooked. . . . It is, in many ways, a very American story." --AV Club
"Like Dante leading us through the levels of hell, Whitehead presents the reader with the levels of rottenness in early to mid-1960s New York City. . . . Harlem Shuffle is yet another Colson Whitehead masterpiece." --BookPage
"[Harlem Shuffle] brings the Black community of the 1960s to life with insight, grace, research, an outstanding cast of characters, and humor that is by turns gritty, culturally observant and wickedly funny. . . . A powerful must-read." --NPR
"Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead returns with a book that solidifies his mastery in a new genre: the crime novel. It's lighter and funnier fare than Whitehead's most recent novels . . . but it's also a nimble exploration of class, identity and family." --TIME
"One of the best storytellers out there flexes new muscles in this perfect blend of noir and humor that's full of hilarious dialogue and engaging plot twists." --The Boston Globe
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