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Little A
August 2017
On Sale: August 1, 2017
334 pages
ISBN: 1503941477
EAN: 9781503941472
Kindle: B01LH2GQ9I
Hardcover / e-Book
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Historical
With characters depicted in precise detail and wide panoramaβa kept-womanβs parlor, a contentious interracial baseball game on the Fourth of July, and the tragic true events of the Omaha Race Riot of 1919βKings of Broken Things reveals the folly of human nature in an era of astonishing ambition. During the waning days of World War I, three lost souls find themselves adrift in Omaha, Nebraska, at a time of unprecedented nationalism, xenophobia, and political corruption. Adolescent European refugee Karel Miihlsteinβs life is transformed after neighborhood boys discover his prodigious natural talent for baseball. Jake Strauss, a young man with a violent past and desperate for a second chance, is drawn into a criminal underworld. Evie Chambers, a kept woman, is trying to make ends meet and looking every which way to escape her cheerless existence. As wounded soldiers return from the front and black migrant workers move north in search of economic opportunity, the immigrant wards of Omaha become a tinderbox of racial resentment stoked by unscrupulous politicians. Punctuated by an unspeakable act of mob violence, the fates of Karel, Jake, and Evie will become inexorably entangled with the schemes of a ruthless political boss whose will to power knows no bounds. Written in the tradition of Don DeLillo and Colum McCann, with a great debt to Ralph Ellison, Theodore Wheelerβs debut novel Kings of Broken Things is a panoramic view of a city on the brink of implosion during the course of this summer of strife.
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