The Second Coming

A luminous novel from the New York Times bestselling author of City on Fire, plunging us deep into the lives of a teenage girl and her father as they navigate love, grief, addiction, redemption and connection.

Reading Garth Risk Hallberg is a constant delightful surprise - you never know what's coming next... The Second Coming is a beautiful and daring novel, as inventive as it is breathtaking

Garth Risk Hallberg's The Second Coming is a sprawling, aching, ultimately hopeful account of a father's love for a daughter and a daughter's defiance of that love when all too often it manifests as dysfunction. Hallberg deals with the dilemma of parental inheritance with a light touch, and the grace that finally descends on the Aspern clan is not only transformative but triumphant

A powerful statement about the clarifying purpose in parental love... A fascinating - and convincing - portrait of a daughter in crisis and a father in need of redemption

Garth Risk Hallberg's great gift is his ability to translate epic themes into intensely intimate, cumulatively powerful novels. Full of tension and emotion and populated by vivid characters and ideas, The Second Coming builds word by word to capture the intricacies of life while revealing its own breathtaking scope

Taking whole swathes of the nation's landscape and way of life... a bravura performance

This is richly pictorial writing that lends itself to novelistic world-building... Hallberg's great theme is the tension between how we see ourselves and how others see us - and how this dynamic is compounded by the workings of family... Hallberg's writing has an infinite quality

Full of brilliant writing... Sparkling prose... Vivid... [There are] flashes of Hallberg's virtuoso sensibility on display throughout. He treats us to one absolute cracker of an observation after another... genuine literary fireworks are to be enjoyed here

Words are not just a means to the story, but an end in themselves, ignited for the sake of seeing how they burn. And over 600 pages they burn wondrously

This rich, 600-page account of a father-daughter is tremendous storytelling

Risk Hallberg was deemed a 'literary wunderkind' for 2015's City on Fire and his follow up is no less ambitious

Verbal pleasures are to be had on every page... Manhattan is beautifully alive

GARTH RISK HALLBERG's first novel, City on Fire, was a New York Times and international bestseller. It was the basis for the Apple TV+ series of the same name. He is also the author of the novella A Field Guide to the North American Family. In 2017, he was named as a Granta Best of Young American Novelist. His work has been translated into seventeen languages.