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A Novel
by Matthew Gallaway
From the smoky music halls of 1860s Paris to the tumbling skyscrapers of twenty-first-century New York, a sweeping tale of passion, music, and the human heart's yearning for connection
Martin is a forty-year-old lawyer who, despite his success, feels disoriented and disconnected from his life in post-9/11 Manhattan. But even as he comes to terms with the missteps of his past, he questions whether his life will feel more genuine going forward.
Decades earlier, in the New York of the 1960s, Anna is destined to be a grande dame of the international stage. As she steps into the spotlight, however, she realizes that the harsh glare of fame may be more than she bargained for.
Maria is a tall, awkward, ostracized teenager desperate to break free from the doldrums of 1970s Pittsburgh. When the operatic power of her extraordinary voice leads Maria to Juilliard, New York seems to hold possibilities that are both exhilarating and uncertain.
Lucien is a young Parisian at the birth of the modern era, racing through the streets of Europe in an exuberant bid to become a singer for the ages. When tragedy leads him to a magical discovery, Lucien embarks on a journey that will help him—and Martin, Maria, and Anna—learn that it’s not how many breaths you take, it’s what you do with those you're given.
This unlikely quartet is bound together across centuries and continents by the strange and spectacular history of Richard Wagner’s masterpiece opera Tristan and Isolde. Grandly operatic in scale, their story is one of music and magic, love and death, betrayal and fate. Matthew Gallaway's riveting debut will have readers spellbound from the opening page to its breathtaking conclusion.
"Gallaway, a former musician, gives music a literary presence, intertwining opera and punk by illuminating their shared passion and chaos." - Publishers Weekly
"A pleasingly intricate puzzle." - Kirkus Reviews
"This charming and inventive novel works as a romantic mystery story of sorts and is recommended for all fiction readers." - Library Journal
"Matthew Gallaway's fascinating and erudite debut novel is a portrait of the passion of several singers across the ages for a single opera, and turns into its own kind of novelistic chorus. Like Tristan und Isolde, the opera at its center, it is complete with wrong love, sacrifice and even a potion. An original new talent has arrived." - Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night
"I know next to nothing about opera and I loved this book. Let me go further: I actually (don't tell anyone) find opera a bit dull, but now consider me a big buff -- if no other reason than it gave us this powerful, beautiful, wondrous novel." - Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and Half a Life
"Matthew Gallaway possesses a massive vision and a wizard-like ability to weave story lines. The Metropolis Case is an ambitious and beautiful book sure to find a devoted following." - Shane Jones, author of Light Boxes
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The Metropolis Case is a terrifically engaging and elegantly panoramic novel that is sure to appeal to fans of majestic fiction such as Kostova's The Historian." - Katharine Weber, author of True Confections and Triangle
This information about The Metropolis Case was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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