The multiple-award-winning Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill and Light Perpetual, returns with a lovingly created, richly pleasure-giving, epically scaled tale set in the golden age of wicked entertainments.
Cahokia Jazz is a thrilling tale of murder and mystery in a city where history has run a little differently. In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper.
It’s 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient city of Cahokia lives on – a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week that will spill the city’s secrets, and bring it, against a soundtrack of wailing clarinets and gunfire, either to destruction or rebirth.
Don’t miss the chance to hear Francis speak about this brilliant new novel.
Tickets: Admission - £10 / Admission + copy of Cahokia Jazz (RRP £20) - £25
'Francis Spufford has one of the most original minds in contemporary literature'- Nick Hornby
Francis Spufford is the author of five highly-praised works of non-fiction, most frequently described by reviewers as either ‘bizarre’ or ‘brilliant’, and usually as both. His debut novel Golden Hill won the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the British Book Awards Debut Novel of the Year. His second novel, Light Perpetual, was awarded the 2022 Encore Award and longlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and lives near Cambridge.
