City of God by E. L. Doctorow

City of God begins in mystery; the large brass cross behind the altar of St Timothy's Episcopal Church in lower Manhattan has disappeared ... and even more mysteriously reappears on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism on the Upper West Side. The Church's maverick rector and a young rabbinical couple who lead the synagogue set about attempting to learn who the vandals are who have committed this strange double act of desecration and to what purpose, but their joint clerical investigation only deepens the mystery. A writer alerted to the story by a newspaper article befriends the priest and the rabbis and finds that their struggles with their respective traditions are relevant to the case. In fact, as the narrative advances and the story broadens, more and more people are implicated in what may be the elusive prophecy of a new American culture. Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, the book opens into a multi-voiced narrative that incorporates the monumental historical events and predominating ideas of our age.

Filled with the sights and sounds of New York and with a cast of vividly drawn characters, including scientists, war veterans, prelates, Holocaust survivors, cabinet members, theologians, New York Times reporters, film actors, and crooners, this dazzlingly inventive, mordantly funny masterpiece emerges as the novel readers have been thirsting for: a defining document of our times, a narrative of the twentieth-century written for the twenty-first.

Genres: Literary Fiction - Religion - Philosophy - Classics - Contemporary - American - Jewish
Condition: Very good
Published: 2000 by Little, Brown and Company
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0316854697
Weight: 445g