City in Amber

"City in Amber takes place in the planned industrial community of Lawrence, MA, a city of 72,000 people located north of Boston on the New Hampshire border. In the early 1990s, a series of apparently random fires grew into an arson wave that made headlines across the U.S. Plagued by high unemployment, gang warfare, and racial unrest, Lawrence became a national symbol of inner city blight and our inability to rectify it. Once known as the textile manufacturing center of the world, the "Immigrant City" literally went up in flames. Based on real events, City in Amber is a novel in the epic tradition, with a central theme of appearance vs. reality, and subsidiary themes of family and romantic love, loyalty, revenge, strength of place, and the corporeal nature of bodies and cities - all explored through the lives of the characters. As Abbott Lawrence says in the novel, "All men stand upon invisible foundations on the deep roots of things they cannot see or understand.""--BOOK JACKET.Atkinson, Jay is the author of 'City in Amber', published 2007 under ISBN 9781931982955 and ISBN 1931982953.