Tim Murphy: Christodora

Christodora

from Grove Press

In this vivid and compelling novel, Tim Murphy follows a diverse set of characters whose fates intertwine in an iconic building in Manhattan's East Village, the Christodora. Moving kaleidoscopically from the Tompkins Square Riots and the attempts by activists to galvanize a true response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, to a future New York City of the 2020s where subzero winters are a thing of the past, Christodora recounts the heartbreak wrought by AIDS, illustrates the allure and destructive power of hard drugs, and brings to life the ever-changing city itself.

On Avenue B in the heart of the Lower East Side, the Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple with artistic ambitions. Their neighbor, Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who was at one point celebrated for his work as an AIDS activist but has now become a lonely addict, becomes connected to Milly and Jared's lives in ways none of them can anticipate. Meanwhile, Milly and Jared’s adopted son, Mateo, grows to see the opportunity for both self-realization and oblivion that New York offers. As the junkies and protestors of the 1980s give way to the hipsters of the 2000s and they, in turn, to the wealthy residents of the crowded, glass-towered city of the 2020s, enormous changes rock the personal lives of Milly and Jared and the constellation of people around them, even as ghosts of the past cast a shadow on their future.

A captivating portrait of how ambition, compulsion, and trauma form and re-form the lives of us all, Christodora is a closely observed panoramic novel that powerfully evokes the danger, chaos, and wonder of New York City—and the strange and moving ways in which its dwellers’ lives can intersect.

Tim Murphy has reported on HIV/AIDS for twenty years, for such publications as Poz magazine, where he was an editor and staff writer, Out, Advocate, and New York magazine, where his July 2014 cover story on the new HIV-prevention pill regimen PrEP was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Magazine Article. He also covers LGBT issues, arts, pop culture, travel, and fashion for publications including the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Details, and Yahoo! Style. He lives in Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley.

Critical praise for Christodora:

"An impassioned, big-hearted, and ultimately hopeful chronicle of a changing New York that authoritatively evokes the despair and panic in the city at the height of the plague."—Hanya Yanagihara

"A moving portrait of New York in the time of AIDS, Tim Murphy’s honest and insightful writing gives Christodora a particular vibrancy that causes the characters to leap, whole, into the reader’s imagination. This spectacular novel is an important addition to literature that captures New York in all its glory and despair."—Candace Bushnell

“[A] vivid account of the AIDS crisis and its aftermath . . . Murphy has written The Bonfire of the Vanities for the age of AIDS, using the same reportorial skills as Tom Wolfe to re-create the changing decades, complete with a pitch-perfect deployment of period detail. Skipping back and forth in time over 40 years, and projecting itself into the near future, the novel achieves a powerful evocation of the plague years.”—Publishers Weekly

“[A] perceptive debut novel . . . Murphy vividly recaptures 1980s and ’90s New York, dampening any pop-culture nostalgia with reminders of the crude pharmacology and callous bureaucracy imposed upon those struggling with AIDS . . . His multigenerational tale is a clever inversion of the usual addiction-begets-AIDs narrative and a reminder that despite recent medical advances, the disease still finds ways to ravage people’s lives . . . It never wavers in its warmth toward its characters, or its insistence upon the possibility of healing.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Christodora is the best novel I’ve read about the cost of activism.”—Paul Yamazaki, City Lights, San Francisco

“I can’t remember a time when I fell in love with a novel and its characters as much as I fell for Christodora by Tim Murphy . . . The secret to this great novel is an all-abiding love that Murphy has for his characters and the redemption that they more than earn. The last fifty pages are among the most vibrant and touching finales I’ve ever read. It is simply beautiful. I will be recommending this book with all my heart when it arrives in stores.”—William Carl, bookseller at Wellesley Books

“Murphy, who has long reported on HIV/AIDS, LGBT issues, pop culture, travel, and the arts for a wide range of publications, here travels through New York City from the AIDS-scarred 1980s to the hipster-dominated 2000s to the wealth-drenched 2020s, all by focusing on a single East Village building.”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

“An exuberant, ambitious, funny, gorgeously written epic, Tim Murphy’s Christodora not only makes us privy to the most intimate secrets and dreams of a group of unforgettable diverse characters, this brilliant tale also sweeps us up into the spirit of our age, from the AIDS crisis to now and even into the future, so that we can see and feel the devastating effects of time as it changes us forever.”—James Hannaham, author of Delicious Foods

“Every once in a while a writer truly gets this town with its buffet of hipsters, crazy characters, and endearing troublemakers. Christodora is a bit of Tom Wolfe, a streamlined City on Fire, and, well, something special and all its own. Tim Murphy—smart, perceptive, and streetwise—is an author with a dazzling eye and ear who delivers a real New York narrative with an absorbing story line and a gallery of characters fit for a twenty-first-century Manhattan mural. It came, I sat, I read and read. I emerged completely satisfied.”—George Hodgman, New York Times bestselling author of Bettyville

“Murphy dives into the story of one of the East Village’s most storied buildings—and returns with a moving novel, a love letter to the complicated families we make here in New York, and to the city itself.”—Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night

“An intimate portrait of a bohemian family, Christodora is also a capacious historical novel that vividly recreates the lost world of downtown Manhattan in the eighties—a nuanced portrait of an era in which artists were unwitting agents of gentrification and the bright dawn of gay liberation was brutally interrupted by the AIDS epidemic.”—Jay McInerney