The crowning achievement of E. L. Doctorow's distinguished literary career--an astonishing modern masterwork of faith, mystery, and the search for spiritual authenticity.
With brilliant and audacious strokes, the author of Ragtime and Billy Bathgate creates a breathtaking collage of memories, events, visions, and provocative thought, all centered on the idea of a modern reality of God. At the heart of this stylistically daring and dazzling inventive tour-de-force is a riveting detective story about a cross that vanishes from a Lower-East-Side church, only to reappear on the roof of an Upper-West-Side synagogue. Intrigued by the mystery--and by the Episcopal priest and female rabbi who investigate the strange desecration--is a well-known novelist whose capacious brain is a virtual repository for the ideas and disasters of the age.
Employing a multi-voiced narrative that perfectly captures the riffs and rhythms of latter-day New York, then broadens to implicate a cast of characters including scientists, war veterans, prelates, Holocaust survivors, cabinet members, theologians, filmmakers, and crooners, City of God is E. L. Doctorow's most ambitious and intensely personal work. Vast in scope, biblical in tone, it is a monumental work of spiritual reflection, philosophy, and history by America's preeminent novelist and chronicler of our time.
"An irresistible masterwork...Doctorow has fashioned a magically imaginative, unpredictable novel that is lushly rooted in moral philosophy and history...a careening, rollicking delight." --The Baltimore Sun
"Dazzling...heartbreaking, and superb...Doctorow's most ambitious and personal work." --The Miami Herald
"A deeply personal book...an ambitious postmodern riff with a grander perspective on the universe...a novel that sets its sights on God and the galaxies that shadow the heavens...a stunning vision of metaphysics and faith, cosmology and spiritual emptiness, the rational mind and messianic longing...sparkles with Doctorow's rich language and ideas." --The Wall Street Journal
"Dazzling...enthralling and suspenseful." --Time magazine
"A great, bubbling, mewling, eloquent, despairing, joyous, agonized, earnest, desperate, and God-hungry work...brilliant." --Mirabella
"Doctorow is unequaled in his ability to breathe life into inert images and fading monuments of the past...{he} illuminates the thorny paradoxes of modern society with felicity and brio." --The New York Times Book Review
"The greatest American novel of the past 50 years...Reading City of God restores one's faith in literature." --Houston Chronicle
"Blooms with a humor and humanity...monumental." --The Los Angeles Times
