NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, this gloriously entertaining novel is “fast-paced, keen-eyed and very funny ... about race, power and the history of Harlem all disguised as a thrill-ride crime novel" (San Francisco Chronicle). "Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn't ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn't ask questions, either. Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa—the "Waldorf of Harlem"—and volunteers Ray's services as the fence. The heist doesn't go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes. Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs? Harlem Shuffle's ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. But mostly, it's a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!

Harlem Shuffle is certainly a well-written book. The characters are fun, the setting is evocative, the plot is compelling, and the sentences pop in places. You are not going to go wrongly reading this book. The real question is how this book stacks up to Whitehead's other transcendent work. Everyone got and appreciated the core theme, the thin line between striving and crime and how all the characters need to find a way to walk it and advance as time marches on, destroying the past. Roy Carney was a fascinating character and we spent a lot of time debating his strengths and flaws. Kim pointed to the line about how Carney takes the stains out of his own clothes as an apt metaphor for this role in story; he's the character who walks between striving and crime, fitting enough in the crime world to get ahead, but keep his head down low enough to not create trouble in his family (we can't help but think his wife knows what he's doing vaguely, but he wisely does not want to bring it too much to her social-justice-oriented perspective), and signs are that most of the time he weaves these worlds masterfully. The choice to make him a furniture salesman both gives us a great set of asides throughout the book and becomes a tight metaphor about how everyone at the end of the day has some domestic in them, no matter how hard they are, and the concept of dorvay in the second section paints his two-sided world beautifully. The book looks at three moments where he's out of his depth and stakes get high, and all of this is very fun -- kind of a light Pynchon version of Ocean's 11 set on 125th Street. The secondary characters, and particularly Pepper and Miss Laura, shine, and the twists of the plot are the right amount of risk and speed to keep the book moving. At the same time, Whitehead does a good job of weaving in questions about race and society and perceived status. One thing we talked a lot about was the different masks people wore in different setttings. All the characters, from Carney to his brother Freddy to Freddy's friend Van Wyck show how they change as they navigate their worlds, and we were impressed at how Whitehead never creates monolithic perspectives in the book. Takes on the protesting, policing, Juneteenth, and Harlem all show that Carney is not a Black everyman, and that in fact there's no such thing. A beautiful passage where Carney goes for a ride with a police officer shows that there are hustles on his block of which even he's unaware, and his brush with the Van Wycks in the final section point to a whole power structure of Whiteness beyond his world. Maybe a good way of putting it is that the book is very local in a very complex world, and so Carney's journey is figuring out in which world he sits and how to best sit there. Overall, it's a very good book, but smaller and breezier than, say, Underground Railroad, and that meant that some of NUBClub found it a bit forgettable. We ended up thinking of it as the beach read of the Whitehead canon, definitely a book you'll enjoy, but not the one that will blow your mind.