NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NOMINEE • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK
TIMES BEST SELLER • 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
Harlem in the 1960s. Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked... To his
customers and neighbors on 125th street Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced
furniture making a decent 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 all the time. Cash is tight especially with all
those installment-plan sofas so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or
necklace Ray doesn't ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn't
ask questions either. Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan 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. Now Ray has a new clientele one made up of shady cops vicious local gangsters
two-bit pornographers and other assorted Harlem lowlifes. Thus begins the internal tussle
between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life he begins to see
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's ingenious story plays out in a
beautifully recreated New York City 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.
