Crook Manifesto: 'Fast, fun, ribald and pulpy, with a touch of Quentin Tarantino' Sunday Times (Hardback) - Colson Whitehead

From two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead comes the thrilling and entertaining sequel to HARLEM SHUFFLE .

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE SUMMER BY OPRAH DAILY, NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, TIME, NPR, LOS ANGELES TIMES, ESSENCE AND MORE

A BBC BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK

'Whether in high literary form or entertaining, page-turner mode, the man is simply incapable of writing a bad book' IAN WILLIAMS, GUARDIAN

'A dazzling treatise . . . gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people' NEW YORK TIMES

'Crook Manifesto gave me something I had missed in recent reading: joy' TELEGRAPH

'A masterpiece' PEOPLE MAGAZINE

From two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead comes the thrilling and entertaining sequel to Harlem Shuffle

1971, New York City. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is going bankrupt, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney is trying to keep his head down, his business up and his life straight. But then he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up an old police contact, who wants favours in return. For Ray, staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.

1973. The old ways are being overthrown by the thriving counterculture, but Pepper, Carney's enduringly violent partner in crime, is a constant. In these difficult times, Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem, finding himself in a world of Hollywood stars and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret.

1976. Harlem is burning, while the country gears up for the Bicentennial. Carney is trying to come up with a celebratory July 4th advertisement he can actually live with, while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire seriously injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it, navigating a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent and the utterly corrupt.

In scalpel-sharp prose and with unnerving clarity and wit, Colson Whitehead writes about a city that runs on cronyism, threats, ego, ambition, incompetence and even, sometimes, pride. Crook Manifesto is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem, and a searching portrait of how families work in the face of chaos and hostility.

'Funny, effortlessly streetwise, and criminally pleasurable to read it's also politically enlightening and quietly incendiary' BIG ISSUE

'When he moves into a new genre, he keeps the bones but does his own decorating' WASHINGTON POST

'Indecently entertaining . . . [Whitehead] is a stylist whose sentences sing' I NEWSPAPER

About the Author

Colson Whitehead is a multi-award winning and bestselling author whose works include The Nickel Boys, The Underground Railroad, The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt and a collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. He is one of only four novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice and is a recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. For The Underground Railroad, Whitehead won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a second time for The Nickel Boys, which also won the George Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kirkus Prize. The Underground Railroad has been adapted as an Amazon Prime TV series, produced and directed by the Academy Award winning director Barry Jenkins, and was broadcast in 2021. He lives with his family in New York City.