“Lazarus Man” by Richard Price

This electrifying novel weaves together the lives of those irrevocably changed by a disaster, in a poignant picture of ever-changing Harlem. Check out our Winter 2025 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Lazarus Man” by Richard Price.

November 28, 2024

LARB Book Club is thrilled to announce our Winter 2025 Book Club title: Lazarus Man by Richard Price! To join the LARB Book Club, where we put you in conversation with editors and members and send a copy of the selected title to your door, become a Friend member today. This discussion has been rescheduled to February 5, 2025, at 6 p.m. PST on Zoom. Register for the discussion here.

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East Harlem, 2008. In an instant, a five-story tenement collapses into a fuming hill of rubble, pancaking the cars parked in front and coating the street with a thick layer of ash. As the city’s rescue services and media outlets respond, the surrounding neighborhood descends into chaos. At day’s end, six bodies are recovered, but many of the other tenants are missing.

In Lazarus Man, Richard Price, one of the greatest chroniclers of life in urban America, creates intertwining portraits of a group of compelling and singular characters whose lives are permanently impacted by the disaster.

Anthony Carter—whose miraculous survival, after being buried for days beneath tons of brick and stone, transforms him into a man with a message and a passionate sense of mission.

Felix Pearl—a young transplant to the city, whose photography and film work that day provokes in this previously unformed soul a sharp sense of personal destiny.

Royal Davis—owner of a failing Harlem funeral home, whose desperate trolling of the scene for potential “customers” triggers a quest to find another path in life.

And Mary Roe—a veteran city detective who, driven in part by her own family’s brutal history, becomes obsessed with finding Christopher Diaz, one of the building’s missing.

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Richard Price is the author of nine previous novels—including Clockers, Freedomland, The Whites, and Lush Life—all of which have won widespread praise for their vividly etched portrayals of urban America. His award-winning writing for television includes The Wire, The Night Of, The Deuce, and The Outsider. His feature film screenplays include Sea of Love, New York Stories, and The Color of Money. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the novelist Lorraine Adams.

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“All of Richard Price’s manifold gifts—the voices he can do, those of the street, those of the fuzz; his panoramic plotting; his kinetic prose—these things are steeped, in Lazarus Man, in a new kind of hard-won wisdom that’s very mellow and very sweet. His people not only break your heart, they hand you back the pieces so you can peer within and know yourself a little better.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

“Gritty and compassionate … [Price] has an ear for streetwise dialogue and an eye for description … A chorus of voices enlivens every page in a kind of urban opera.” —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times 

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Join our Book Club today to get Lazarus Man plus our next three staff-curated selections, as well as access to our quarterly discussions hosted by LARB staff. Previous selections have included Entitlement by Rumaan Alam, The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan, and Molly by Blake Butler.

In the meantime, check out Andy Reischling’s essay “New York City and the Staging of Disaster” and Oliver Wang’s review of The 99% Invisible City and The City Beneath for an exploration of the political and cultural implications of urban disaster.