The City Is a Rising Tide Book

In New York City, Justine Laxness works as a money manager at an international nonprofit company, Aquinas. Her obsession with her boss, Peter, spurs her to embezzle funds and lend the money to James Nutter, a screenwriter and old flame who has resurfaced in Justine's life after fifteen years. But every action she takes will have unforeseen ramifications, creating a tidal wave of betrayal and destruction, from the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze to the refined vistas of Central Park. Lyrical and suspenseful by turns, The City Is a Rising Tide is an enchanting work of luminous prose and uncommon imagination.

Publishers Weekly

Early 1990s New York and 1970s Beijing intersect in the memory of Justine, who narrates her own downward spiral into an obsessive, unrequited love. Justine and co-worker Peter are, respectively, the sole staff and founder of a quasi-legitimate nonprofit quixotically attempting to build a holistic center in boom-time China. The two first met when Justine was just a child in Mao's Beijing, and Peter was already tossing about in shadowy financial deals; she fell for him then. A self-righteous ex-boyfriend, a chorus of women friends and a concerned family all tell Justine that waiting for Peter to reciprocate her love is a masochist's dream; a late revelation concerning Peter's unavailability is unsustained by the wispy plot. Like Justine, this debut lacks definition, but that becomes one of its strengths: a portrait of a perceptive yet lost woman who traces her own self-destruction with the same patient helplessness with which she loves. (July) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.