The World of Tomorrow
“What a beguiling debut!”
—Richard Russo
“Brash, bold, completely entertaining.”
—Andrea Barrett
“Comic, violent, and moving.”
—John Irving
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and Library Journal
Honor Book (Finalist) for the Massachusetts Book Award
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
June 1939. Francis Dempsey and his shell-shocked brother, Michael, are on an ocean liner from Ireland headed for their brother Martin’s home in New York City, having stolen a small fortune from the IRA. During the week that follows, their lives collide spectacularly with big-band jazz musicians, a talented but fragile heiress, a Jewish street photographer facing a return to Nazi-occupied Prague, a vengeful mobster, and the ghosts of their own family’s revolutionary past.
From the smoky jazz joints of Harlem to the Plaza Hotel, from the garrets of artists in the Bowery to the shadowy warehouses of mobsters in Hell’s Kitchen, Brendan Mathews brings prewar New York to vivid, pulsing life, while the sweeping and intricate storytelling of this remarkable debut reveals an America that blithely hoped it could avoid another catastrophic war by focusing instead on the promise of the World’s Fair: a peaceful, prosperous “World of Tomorrow.”