Set at the turn of the 20th century, the story of the father of New York City, his mysterious assassination and his hidden life, for fans of Golden Hill and Kavalier and Clay.
The 'Father of Greater New York' is dead. Shot outside his Park Avenue mansion in the year of our Lord, 1903. In the hour of his death, will the truth of his life finally break free?
Born to a struggling farming family in 1820, Andrew Haswell Green was a self-made man who reshaped Manhattan, built Central Park and turned New York into a modern metropolis. Now, at eighty-three, when he thought the world could hold no more surprises, he is murdered. As the detective assigned to the case traces his ghost across the city, other spectres appear: a wealthy courtesan; a broken-hearted man in a bowler hat; and an ambitious politician, Samuel, whose lifelong friendship was a source of joy and frustration.
In a life of industry and restraint, where is the space for love? As restlessly inventive and absorbing as its protagonist, The Great Mistake is the story of a city, and a singular man, transformed by longing.
About the Author
Jonathan Lee is the author of the novels High Dive - a New York Times bestseller - Joy and Who is Mr Satoshi? He has been shortlisted for the Edinburgh Festival First Book Award the Desmond Elliott Prize for literature, and longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. Born in the UK, he now lives in New York.
Industry Reviews
'Jonathan Lee's The Great Mistake is a novel so comprehensively steeped in American literary history that it comes as something of a surprise to find that its author is a fortysomething from Surrey... There's Fitzgerald, of course - The Great Gatsby is echoed in more than just the novel's title. There's Hemingway in the muscular lyricism of the prose; Sherwood Anderson and Steinbeck in the beautifully drawn portraits of rural America; there's the restraint of Henry James in the sinuous sentences... It's perhaps fitting that at a time when the Great American Novel is at a low ebb [...] a Brit should write what is likely to be the best American novel of the year. The Great Mistake is a book of extraordinary intelligence and style, written in language at once beautiful and playfully aphoristic. It's a novel whose protagonist - decent, dignified, wounded - will live long in the mind of those that read it, a novel that delivers wholeheartedly on Lee's early promise' - The Observer
'Seriously entertaining... the novel is hugely ambitious and pleasingly odd... The detective work is ingenious and provides a teasing, low-key suspense... The Great Mistake seems to float free of its era and defy the constraints of its genre. I won't say it's one of a kind, only that I wish there were more novels like it' - Sunday Times
