Cool Machine
by the two-time Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad
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Cool Machine
Pre-order Now for £21.54
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Colson Whitehead
Summary
1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture's Dealer of the Month. When the banks won't give his beloved wife, Elizabeth, a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.
1983. To some, Carney's friend and partner in crime Pepper is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he's feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he's plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you're uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence - Pepper is a native speaker.
1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie's death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie's son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he's spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.
With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to Sugar Hill, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead's vivid characters, it's what's below the surface that reveals the truth.©2026 Colson Whitehead
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Critic reviews
Two-time Pulitzer winner and the author of Oprah's 75th Book Club pick The Underground Railroad closes out his Harlem Trilogy with a swaggering trip through early '80s New York. In Cool Machine, furniture dealer Ray Carney - who secretly buys and flips stolen goods with expert finesse - is tempted into one last job when money tightens at home, while his lethal partner Pepper drifts into downtown art-club chaos. Add old ghosts, bigger risks, and a city turning glossy and ruthless, and you've got Whitehead at his best
Colson Whitehead has won the Pulitzer Prize two very well-deserved times, and Cool Machine is the latest in his staggeringly poignant oeuvre. New York City as it existed in the 1980s serves as the backdrop for this novel, and Whitehead masterfully leverages both its grit and glamour to stunning effect
Colson Whitehead, one of America's most celebrated novelists, concludes his Harlem-set trilogy with protagonist Ray Carney and his family facing down fresh threats in a New York City transfigured by the whiplash of Ronald Reagan's conservatism. Throughout the 1980s, Ray and his partner in crime, Pepper, juggle heists and bourgeois aspirations, feeling the shiv of racism pressed against their fates. From rejuvenated uptown blocks to the East Village's high-octane art scene, Whitehead offers an ode to a majestic city and its diverse people
Whitehead's justly celebrated Harlem Trilogy comes to a triumphant, satisfying conclusion. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner has brought his decades-long saga of furniture retailer and part-time criminal fence Ray Carney into the 1980s, a time of starkly mixed blessings for a New York City galvanized by reckless real estate development, plagued with widespread homelessness, and immersed in crime and corruption of gaudy proportions...[A] book that's sustained throughout by rich, engaging characterizations and lucid, provocative reflections on a community, a city, and a people which it presents as both exasperating and captivating with equal intensity. A master novelist in full command of his powers as a storyteller, prose stylist, and social observer
[Cool Machine], a glorious fusion of crime, rebel creativity, and metaphysics, dissects the 1980s... Every page is incandescent with longing, doubts, calculations, and determination as Whitehead's magnetic characters are pushed to the limits and the city roils. Whitehead gets every gritty, absurd, tender detail just right as he maps the eighties zeitgeist and its foreshadowing of our own, revealing an immense web of malfeasance. This is a masterwork of crime fiction infused with labyrinthine suspense; brilliant, witty, and dynamic social insights; and profound questions of survival
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