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Amusing and poignant, The Gargoyle Hunters is a love letter to a vanishing city, and a deeply mental history of fathers and sons. Intimately portraying New York's elbow-jostling relationship with time, the novel solves the puzzle of your brazen and seemingly impossible architectural heist - the theft of a whole ancient Manhattan building - that stunned the location and made the front page of the New York Times in 1974. With both his family and his city fracturing, 13-year-old Griffin W is recruited into his estranged father's illicit and dangerous architectural salvage business. Small and nimble, Griffin is charged with stealing exuberantly expressive 19th-century architectural sculptures - gargoyles - right off the encounters of unsung tenements and iconic skyscrapers all over town. As his father talks about it, these gargoyles, carved and cast by immigrant artisans during the city's architectural glory days and nights, are an endangered varieties in this era of sweeping urban renewal. Desperate both to hook up with his father and to raise cash to pay the mortgage loan on the brownstone where he lives along with his mother and sister, Griffin is poor to recognize that his father's deepening obsession with preserving the architectural treasures of Beaux Arts New York is also a destructive force, imperiling Griffin's friendships, his relationship with his very first girl, and even his life. As his father grows increasingly possessive of both Griffin's mother and his scavenged touchstones of the lost city, Griffin must understand how to build himself into the person he wants to become and find out which parts of his life can be salvaged - and which parts must be let go. Maybe damage, he reflects, is the thing no one can ever take away from you. Sensitive, funny, and achingly sad, The Gargoyle Hunters presents an extraordinary new novelist.
