Christodora

Brilliantly kaleidoscopic . . . Murphy is exceptionally skilled at writing about addiction, the intertwining of bliss and abjection... What makes this novel remarkable, though, is the way it captures the full arc of Aids in New York . . . There have been several whopping New York novels in the last couple of years, but none of them possesses Christodora’s generosity, its weathered and unflinching faith in what people can achieve.Olivia Laing, Guardian

This novel is your next must-read . . . A captivating, multi-stranded New York epic about the AIDs crisis . . . An engrossing and inspiring story of loss, love and hope, set against a backdrop of art, activism and addiction.Observer

This thrillingly accomplished novel... [Its] varied minds and voices are realized so convincingly that Christodora sometimes seems the product of spirit possession. And it is joyous despite its subject matter... Murphy's skills are most nakedly on display as he describes the addictions in which Mateo and others find solace, and their electrical-shocking, soul-warping, mind-annihilating trips. Desperately intense, it is the kind of scene that requires putting a book down for a moment to take a breather.New York Times

Hugely ambitious . . . this rich, complicated story . . . compelling . . . The richness of Murphy's account . . . the most moving sections of the book deal not with the height of the [AIDS] crisis but with its aftermath . . . The book's overwhelmingly powerful final sections... the last hundred [pages] have a rare narrative sweep and force. For all the despair it documents, [it is] a book about hopeGarth Greenwell, Washington Post