The Second Coming

A luminous novel from the New York Times bestselling author of City on Fire, plunging us deep into the lives of a teenage girl and her father as they navigate love, grief, addiction, redemption and connection.

When 13-year-old Jolie Aspern drops her phone onto the subway tracks in 2011, her estranged dad, Ethan, seems like the furthest thing from her mind. A convicted felon and recovering addict, Ethan has always struggled to see past himself. But then a call from his ex makes him fear their daughter's in deeper trouble than anyone realises. Believing he's the only one who can save her, he decides to return to New York with a gift: the whole of his life, its hard-won triumphs and harrowing mistakes...

So begins the intimate epic of Jolie and Ethan: child and adult, apart and together, different yet the same. Their journey toward each other will face opposition from grandparents and siblings and friends. It will strain connections with roommates and benefactors and a probation officer desperate to help. It will push Jolie out past her depth with a mysterious admirer, and Ethan in over his head with his first love, Jolie's mom. But as father and daughter struggle to find their footing, new vistas beckon: from a surf break in mid-'90s Delaware to group therapy during the Great Recession, from an encampment at Occupy Wall Street to a HoJo on Maryland's Eastern Shore, from the heights of the Brooklyn Bridge to horizons seldom seen in fiction.

The Second Coming is at once an incandescent feat of storytelling and an exploration of an enduring mystery: can we ever really outrun the past, stay true to ourselves while still chasing something new? Full of music and pathos and passion, this beautifully attuned work of fiction makes good Garth Risk Hallberg's extraordinary promise.

Reading Garth Risk Hallberg is a constant delightful surprise - you never know what's coming next... The Second Coming is a beautiful and daring novel, as inventive as it is breathtaking -- Nathan Hill
Garth Risk Hallberg's The Second Coming is a sprawling, aching, ultimately hopeful account of a father's love for a daughter and a daughter's defiance of that love when all too often it manifests as dysfunction. Hallberg deals with the dilemma of parental inheritance with a light touch, and the grace that finally descends on the Aspern clan is not only transformative but triumphant -- Joshua Ferris
A powerful statement about the clarifying purpose in parental love... A fascinating - and convincing - portrait of a daughter in crisis and a father in need of redemption -- Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves
Garth Risk Hallberg's great gift is his ability to translate epic themes into intensely intimate, cumulatively powerful novels. Full of tension and emotion and populated by vivid characters and ideas, The Second Coming builds word by word to capture the intricacies of life while revealing its own breathtaking scope -- Christina Baker Kline, author of #1 New York Times bestseller Orphan Train
Taking whole swathes of the nation's landscape and way of life... a bravura performance Mail on Sunday
This is richly pictorial writing that lends itself to novelistic world-building... Hallberg's great theme is the tension between how we see ourselves and how others see us - and how this dynamic is compounded by the workings of family... Hallberg's writing has an infinite quality Literary Review
Full of brilliant writing... Sparkling prose... Vivid... [There are] flashes of Hallberg's virtuoso sensibility on display throughout. He treats us to one absolute cracker of an observation after another... genuine literary fireworks are to be enjoyed here Irish Times
Words are not just a means to the story, but an end in themselves, ignited for the sake of seeing how they burn. And over 600 pages they burn wondrously TLS
This rich, 600-page account of a father-daughter is tremendous storytelling Independent
Risk Hallberg was deemed a 'literary wunderkind' for 2015's City on Fire and his follow up is no less ambitious British Airways The Club magazine
Verbal pleasures are to be had on every page... Manhattan is beautifully alive FT

GARTH RISK HALLBERG's first novel, City on Fire, was a New York Times and international bestseller. It was the basis for the Apple TV+ series of the same name. He is also the author of the novella A Field Guide to the North American Family. In 2017, he was named as a Granta Best of Young American Novelist. His work has been translated into seventeen languages.

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