A Wall Street Journal Top Ten Fiction Book of the Year * A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year * A Seattle Times Favorite Book of the Year * An NPR Best Book of the Year * A Kirkus Reviews Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year * A Library Journal Top Historical Fiction Book of the Year * Winner of the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and the Desmond Elliott Prize * Winner of the New York City Book Award “Gorgeously crafted…Spufford’s sprawling recreation here is pitch perfect.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air “A fast-paced romp that keeps its eyes on the moral conundrums of America.” —The New Yorker “Delirious storytelling backfilled with this much intelligence is a rare and happy sight.” —The New York Times “Golden Hill possesses a fluency and immediacy, a feast of the senses…I love this book.” —The Washington Post The spectacular first novel from acclaimed nonfiction author Francis Spufford follows the adventures of a mysterious young man in mid-18th-century Manhattan, thirty years before the American Revolution. New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat arrives at a countinghouse door on Golden Hill Street: this is Mr. Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion shimmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge sum, and he won’t explain why, or where he comes from, or what he is planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him? Rich in language and historical perception, yet compulsively readable, Golden Hill is “a remarkable achievement—remarkable, especially, in its intelligent re-creation of the early years of what was to become America’s greatest city” (The Wall Street Journal). Spufford paints an irresistible picture of a New York provokingly different from its later metropolitan self, but already entirely a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love—and find a world of trouble. Golden Hill is “immensely pleasurable…Read it for Spufford’s brilliant storytelling, pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, and gift for re-creating a vanished time” (Newsday).

Francis Spufford began as the author of four highly praised books of nonfiction. His first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers Guild Award for Best Nonfiction Book, the Banff Mountain Book Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. It was followed by The Child That Books Built, Backroom Boys, and most recently, Unapologetic. But with Red Plenty, he switched to the novel. Golden Hill won multiple literary prizes on both sides of the Atlantic; Light Perpetual was longlisted for the Booker Prize; and Cahokia Jazz was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. In England, he is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.