The Gargoyle Hunters, Paperback

Descriere

Both his family and his city are crumbling when thirteen-year-old Griffin Watts stumbles headlong into his estranged father's illicit and dangerous architectural salvage business in 1970s Manhattan. Small and nimble, Griffin is sent crawling up the facades of tenements and iconic skyscrapers to steal their exuberant nineteenth-century architectural sculptures--gargoyles and sea monsters, goddesses and kings. As his father sees it, these evocative sculptures, crafted by immigrant artisans in the city's architectural glory days, are an endangered species in this era of sweeping urban renewal. Desperate for money to help his artist mother keep their home, and yearning to connect with his father, Griffin resists the realization that his father's deepening obsession with preserving the treasures of Gilded Age New York is also a destructive force that endangers them all. As he struggles to hold his family together and build a first love with his girlfriend on a sturdier foundation than his parents' marriage, Griffin must learn to develop himself into the man he wants to become, and discern which parts of his life may be salvaged--and which parts must be let go. Hilarious and poignant, The Gargoyle Hunters is both a vivid love letter to a vanishing city and an intimate portrait of father and son. This critically acclaimed debut novel solves the mystery of an impossibly brazen architectural heist--the theft of an entire landmark building--that made the front page of The New York Times in 1974. With writing both tender and powerful, The Gargoyle Hunters brings a remarkable new voice to the canon of New York fiction.