Jesuit Media Lab Book Club Author Event: Francis Spufford on “Cahokia Jazz”

Join the Jesuit Media Lab Book Club for a live Zoom conversation with Francis Spufford on his 2024 novel “Cahokia Jazz.”

The bestselling and award-winning author of “Golden Hill” delivers a “dazzling” (Los Angeles Times), “smoky, brooding noir set in the 1920s” (Slate) that reimagines how American history would be different if, instead of being decimated, Indigenous populations had thrived.

Like his earlier novel “Golden Hill,” Francis Spufford’s “Cahokia Jazz” inhabits a different version of America, now through the lens of a subtly altered 1920s — a fully imagined world filled with fog, cigarette smoke, dubious motives, danger and dark deeds. In the main character of hard-boiled detective Joe Barrow, we have a hero of truly epic proportions, a troubled soul to fall in love with as you are swept along by a propulsive and brilliantly twisty plot.

One snowy night at the end of winter, Barrow and his partner find a body on the roof of a skyscraper. Down below, streetcar bells ring, factory whistles blow, Americans drink in speakeasies and dance to the tempo of modern times. But this is Cahokia, the ancient Indigenous city beside the Mississippi living on as a teeming industrial metropolis containing people of every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. Yet that corpse on the roof will spark a week of drama in which this altered world will spill its secrets and be brought, against a soundtrack of jazz clarinets and wailing streetcars, either to destruction or rebirth.

“Atmospheric … many of us will recognize our own held-breath bafflement, caught, as we are, on the darkling plain of our own barely believable times.” (The Washington Post)

Winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History * Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction * Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, The New York Times, Fresh Air (top 10 pick), NPR, the Los Angeles Times (top 15 pick), The Washington Post and more!