From the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys — a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns and rip-offs set in 1960s Harlem.
To his customers along 125th Street, Ray Carney is an upstanding furniture salesman — a family man with a store full of gently used sofas and a wife, Elizabeth, expecting their second child. Few know that Ray also comes from a family of crooks, and that his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, no questions asked.
Then Freddie falls in with a crew planning to rob the Hotel Theresa — the “Waldorf of Harlem” — and volunteers Ray's services as the fence. The heist doesn't go as planned, and Ray finds himself pulled between two worlds: the striving shopkeeper and the hustler's son, each tugging at the other as Harlem itself changes around them.
Part crime caper, part family saga, part love letter to a vanished New York, Harlem Shuffle is Whitehead at his most purely enjoyable — and the first in his acclaimed Ray Carney trilogy, continued in Crook Manifesto.
Praise
“Gloriously entertaining.” — Evening Standard
“Dazzling.” — Guardian
About the author
Colson Whitehead is one of only four novelists ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice — for The Underground Railroad (which also won the National Book Award) and The Nickel Boys. He lives in New York.
