Brooklyn based author Garth Risk Hallberg's debut novel City on Fire sold for a six figure sum in 2013 and it's guaranteed to make similar waves when it's released by Jonathan Cape on October 22.

The 900 page tome, described by UK publisher Alex Bowler as a 'distillation of great American writing' and 'like an HBO box set' inspired by Patti Smith and James Baldwin, features a wide range of characters living in New York whose lives are knitted together by a shooting in a park. Incorporating themes including punk rock, the 1977 blackout and the financial crisis, all inspired by a bus ride past the city's post-9/11 skyline, the novel has already been optioned for film and sold in 17 countries around the world. Hallberg is already a great contributor to the American literary scene as a regular book reviewer in the New York Times Book Review and a contributing editor to online literary magazine The Millions, but with this novel - and comparisons to literary greats including David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz and Thomas Pynchon - he looks set to be a driving force worldwide as one of our most exciting young novelists.