** Includes the first chapter of the hugely anticipated new novel by Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz. **Winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2016Winner of the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2017Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize 2017Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2017Shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2017Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Debut Novel of the Year 2017A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYNew York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan Island, 1746. One rainy evening, a charming and handsome young stranger fresh off the boat from England pitches up to a counting house on Golden Hill Street, with a suspicious yet compelling proposition -- he has an order for a thousand pounds in his pocket that he wishes to cash. But can he be trusted? This is New York in its infancy, a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love, and find a world of trouble . . .

Francis Spufford is the author of five highly-praised works of non-fiction, most frequently described by reviewers as either'bizarre' or'brilliant', and usually as both. His debut novel Golden Hill won the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award and the British Book Awards Debut Novel of the Year. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and lives near Cambridge.