Lazarus Man, Richard Price
Lazarus Man, Richard Price
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Lazarus Man
A Novel

Author: Richard Price

Narrator: Robb Moreira

Unabridged: 11 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/12/2024


Synopsis

In this electrifying novel, Richard Price, the author of Clockers and a writer on The Wire, gives us razor-sharp anatomy of an ever-changing Harlem.

"Novelist Richard Price has as fine an ear for American speech as anyone writing today..."—AudioFile

East Harlem, 2008. In an instant, a five-story tenement collapses into a fuming hill of rubble, pancaking the cars parked in front and coating the street with a thick layer of ash. As the city’s rescue services and media outlets respond, the surrounding neighborhood descends into chaos. At day’s end, six bodies are recovered, but many of the other tenants are missing.

In Lazarus Man, Richard Price, one of the greatest chroniclers of life in urban America, creates intertwining portraits of a group of compelling and singular characters whose lives are permanently impacted by the disaster.

Anthony Carter—whose miraculous survival, after being buried for days beneath tons of brick and stone, transforms him into a man with a message and a passionate sense of mission.

Felix Pearl—a young transplant to the city, whose photography and film work that day provokes in this previously unformed soul a sharp sense of personal destiny.

Royal Davis—owner of a failing Harlem funeral home, whose desperate trolling of the scene for potential “customers” triggers a quest to find another path in life.

And Mary Roe—a veteran city detective who, driven in part by her own family’s brutal history, becomes obsessed with finding Christopher Diaz, one of the building’s missing.

Price, the bestselling author of Lush Life and, most recently, The Whites, has created a bravura portrait of a community on the edge of disintegration. Rich with indelible characters and high drama, Lazarus Man is a riveting work of suspense and social vision by one of our major writers.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About Richard Price

Richard Price is the author of several novels—including Lazarus Man, Clockers, and Lush Life—all of which have won universal praise for their vividly etched portrayals of urban America. He has written for television dramas, including The Night Of, The Deuce, and The Wire, as well as numerous screenplays, including Sea of Love, Ransom, and The Color of Money, directed by Martin Scorsese, for which he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the novelist Lorraine Adams.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Ron on November 07, 2024

Near the start of Richard Price’s new novel, “Lazarus Man,” a five-story apartment building in East Harlem explodes and collapses with “a primordial volcanic roar.” As the wailing alarms of ambulances slice the morning air, a cloud of necrotic dust blots out the sun. First responders climb over a pan......more

Goodreads review by Chris on January 21, 2025

Harlem, 2008: a small apartment building collapses and after 36 hours under the rubble, Anthony Carter is pulled out alive: Lazarus Man. He's the fulcrum around which Richard Price spins a study of a half-dozen or so very engaging characters and perhaps that many subplots. But make no mistake, while......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on December 13, 2024

Set in Harlem, New York in 2008, to me, this novel picks up where earlier Price novels I’d read left off. I’d read Clockers, Samaritan, and Lush Life quite a few years back, and I recall how the dialogue really grabbed me and hauled me through the stories. I can’t recall plots or characters – the la......more

Goodreads review by Kasa on October 28, 2024

Richard Price writes of the City he knows. In Lush Life, it was the lower East Side, where he lived at the time. Far as I know, he now lives in Harlem. As with other authors, he sets his story pre-2016 which avoids the changes wrought in that year. The Lazarus Man is Anthony Walker, who is extricate......more

Goodreads review by Adam on November 27, 2024

Very little plot or tension here, but I didn't even care for most of the novel because I could hang out with Richard Price characters nonstop, Royal Davis the undertaker being the standout. I think the lack of tension does rob the ending of some of its punch, though. I wasn't super invested in the i......more


Quotes

"Price delivers a remarkable excavation of urban angst in this story of a five-story East Harlem tenement building that collapses . . . As [Price's] vivid characters cross paths following the tragedy, they compose a searing snapshot of contemporary Harlem annotated with the author’s precise observations . . . Price once again proves he’s the bard of New York City street life." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Richard Price has long been lauded as an expert observer of urban life in the United States. Lazarus Man, a streetwise story of a small group of New Yorkers brought together unexpectedly by tragedy and the quest for redemption, will only enhance that reputation . . . With his keen eye, efficiently constructed scenes, and, above all, crisp dialogue . . . [Price] follows the lives of these world-weary characters over the course of roughly 10 days, while artfully revealing the elements of their pasts that have brought them to this singular moment.” —Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness

"Richard Price is our peerless dramatizer of the contemporary urban underbelly, reminding us that the beating heart of a city lies within the collective hearts of the denizens shuffling through their demanding lives . . . " —Booklist


Awards

  • Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year