Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Historical adventure fiction

ELECTRIC CITY

Elizabeth Rosner

ELECTRIC CITY is a vital, pulsing novel of America, of its great scientific ingenuity and its emotional ambition; one that frames the birth and evolution of its towns against the struggles of its indigenous tribes, the immigrant experience, a country divided, and the technological advancements that ushered in the modern world.

Autumn 1919: The pull of scientific discovery brings Charles Proteus Steinmetz, brilliant mathematician, to town. His ability to capture lightning in a bottle earns him the title ‘Wizard of Electric City’.

Steinmetz is barely four feet tall with a deeply curving spine, but his physical deformity belies his great intellect. Allied with his Mohawk friend Joseph Longboat and his adopted eleven-year-old granddaughter, Midget, the advancements he makes in Electric City will, quite simply, change the world.

Autumn 1965: Ensconced in Electric City, Sophie Levine is coming of age just as the town is gasping its last breaths. Into her orbit drifts Henry, the favored son of one of electric City’s founding Dutch families, as well as Martin, grandson of Joseph Longboat.

ELECTRIC CITY is a vital, pulsing novel of America, of its great scientific ingenuity and its emotional ambition; one that frames the birth and evolution of its towns against the struggles of its indigenous tribes, the immigrant experience, a country divided, and the technological advancements that ushered in the modern world.

Available products
Book Published 2014-10-01 by Counterpoint
Book Published 2014-10-01 by Counterpoint

Comments

With deft descriptions, Rosner sketches the bustling city, on land long cherished by aboriginal culture, which grew and flourished as whites invaded and industrialized… Rosner's best work, however, is developing the characters of the three young people… Rosner offers a gentle meditation on love and loss: "Rivers, oceans, the passing of molecules back and forth, darkness into brilliance and then gone."

Reminiscent of In the Skin of a Lion and set in a 1960s New York manufacturing town once founded by Thomas Edison, Electric City is a love story made incandescent by Rosner's prose. The triangle she creates between Sophie Levine and her two admirers is as tangled, tragic, and beautiful as the history of their fundamentally American city.

A heady mix of world-changing history (Thomas Edison and Charles Steinmetz) coupled against a bewitching love triangle ignites Rosner's gorgeously written exploration of the way inventions transform cities, hearts, and lives, sometimes with a terrible cost, and the way light nudges inroads in the darkness. Electrifyingly original.

At the heart of this gripping novel is the brilliant mathematician Charles Proteus Steinmetz, whose ability to capture lightning in a bottle electrifies a city and animates the lives of friends and strangers. Rosner achieves something just as powerful and thrilling in this marvelous book.