Lost Empress

"Ambitious, affecting, intelligent, plangent, comic, kooky and impassioned. I've read a lot of novels this year, between judging the Man Booker prize and the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, and I've yearned for this kind of exuberant, precise fiction" Stuart Kelly, Guardian on A Naked Singularity

It had to be big to put Paterson, New Jersey on the map.

And there's folk who would have muttered - if you told them that their unlovable corner of America would be thrust into the spotlight - sign of the end times.

Hell, they might even be right.

But Nina Gill is determined to do just that. Daughter of the aging owner of the Dallas Cowboys - and the well-kept secret to their success - she is shocked when her brother inherits the team, leaving her with the Paterson Pork, New Jersey's only Indoor Football League franchise. She vows to take on the NFL and make the Paterson Pork pigskin kings of America.

Meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles - a brilliant criminal mastermind - has gotten himself thrown into Rikers Island prison to commit perhaps the most audacious crime of all time. And now he's on the inside, he has two good reasons to get out. But how does a person of colour go about breaking out of the penal system when the whole of the land of the free is addicted to keeping him in it?

And, besides - like everyone else - Nuno DeAngeles is running out of . . . time.