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    Cool Machine

    A Novel

    Part of The Harlem Trilogy

    Author Colson Whitehead
    Hardcover
    $30.00 US
    Doubleday Publishing | Doubleday
    On sale Jul 21, 2026 | 368 Pages | 9780385550505
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    From #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy

    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 the Meadowlands, 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.
    NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME, Vulture, Today.com, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, LitHub, Bookriot

    “Cool Machine is the latest in [Whitehead’s] 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. You’ll follow businessman Ray Carney, his wife, Elizabeth, and a kingpin named Pepper across the city, the decade, and insurmountable change.”
    —Harper's Bazaar

    “Electrifying. . . . A glorious fusion of crime, rebel creativity, and metaphysics. . . . 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.”
    —Booklist     (starred review)

    “Whitehead concludes his Harlem Trilogy with a transcendent and wildly entertaining novel in which his recurring characters grapple with the ways their lives are defined by crime and the city they call home. . . . The heists, stakeouts, and showdowns are rendered with grit and precision, but the real wallops come in breathtaking riffs on the city’s magnetic force. . . . It’s the greatest New York novel in years.”
    —Publishers Weekly     (starred review)
    © Madeline Whitehead
    Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which in 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He lives in New York City.

    Colson Whitehead is available for select speaking engagements. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@ penguinrandomhouse.com or visitwww.prhspeakers.com. View titles by Colson Whitehead

    About

    From #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy

    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 the Meadowlands, 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.

    Reviews

    NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME, Vulture, Today.com, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, LitHub, Bookriot

    “Cool Machine is the latest in [Whitehead’s] 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. You’ll follow businessman Ray Carney, his wife, Elizabeth, and a kingpin named Pepper across the city, the decade, and insurmountable change.”
    —Harper's Bazaar

    “Electrifying. . . . A glorious fusion of crime, rebel creativity, and metaphysics. . . . 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.”
    —Booklist     (starred review)

    “Whitehead concludes his Harlem Trilogy with a transcendent and wildly entertaining novel in which his recurring characters grapple with the ways their lives are defined by crime and the city they call home. . . . The heists, stakeouts, and showdowns are rendered with grit and precision, but the real wallops come in breathtaking riffs on the city’s magnetic force. . . . It’s the greatest New York novel in years.”
    —Publishers Weekly     (starred review)

    Author

    © Madeline Whitehead
    Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which in 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He lives in New York City.

    Colson Whitehead is available for select speaking engagements. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@ penguinrandomhouse.com or visitwww.prhspeakers.com. View titles by Colson Whitehead

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