New York City

New York City is the novel’s inhabited landscape and one of its central contrasts: a place of crowded streets, public institutions, and changing neighborhoods that also contains abandoned islands, deep woods, and histories reaching back beyond the city itself. Its ordinary geography repeatedly becomes a threshold. Characters cross the boroughs in search of work, family, or answers, while the city’s older terrain makes room for stories of magic and creatures concealed within the modern metropolis.

A city in motion

The story begins during the 1968 New York City garbage strike, when sanitation workers stopped collecting rubbish for eight days and roughly one hundred thousand tons accumulated across the five boroughs. In Queens, the strike forms the bleak public backdrop to Lillian Kagwa and Brian West’s first meeting. Lillian, twenty-five and newly arrived from Uganda, knows no one in the city; her command of English, shaped by Uganda’s British rule, helps her find work as a secretary at Glamour Time, a modeling agency near Queensboro Plaza. Brian, a parole officer from Syracuse, visits the agency to monitor its founder, Pavel Aresenyev, but becomes increasingly preoccupied with Lillian. Their meeting begins a family history that the book places amid both urban disorder and the possibility of new beginnings.

The agency makes the city’s economic geography concrete. Glamour Time operates from a windowless second-floor office, far from high fashion but conveniently placed to draw aspiring models from working-class Queens. Its business is fraudulent, though Lillian does not know that when she accepts a job paying three dollars an hour, twice the state minimum wage. Brian’s repeated visits make the front office a poor place for Aresenyev to continue his scheme; he fires Lillian, and Brian’s pursuit of the parole violation sends Aresenyev back to prison. The same small stretch of Queens therefore joins Lillian’s precarious entry into city life to Brian’s work and the circumstances of their courtship.

New York also becomes the terrain of Apollo Kagwa’s working life. He leaves Queens College plans behind after deciding that he wants to deal in books. At nineteen he moves out of Lillian’s apartment to a cramped studio in Jackson Heights, crowded with books and short on space for a bed, and travels across the country on book hunts. His major discovery comes at an estate sale in the Bronx: forty-two containers hold a rare collection of books on magic and the occult, left by the D’Agostinos. Apollo makes an offer, brings the books home in a rented van, and spends a week cataloging them. The city’s houses, apartments, and estate sales are not incidental scenery to his work; they are the places where he looks for books and where a dealer’s livelihood can turn on what a family has left behind.

Streets, institutions, and private crises

The city’s distances and public services press directly on family life. When Emma Valentine goes into labor during dinner at Bouley restaurant, Apollo leaves the table to help her. Emma insists on a home birth rather than an ambulance ride to a hospital. They are downtown on Duane Street, while their apartment is in Washington Heights; on a Friday night, the route by car along the West Side Highway could take an hour or more. The geography of a single borough-spanning journey becomes part of the circumstances of the birth, bringing the city’s traffic and the couple’s chosen plan into the same urgent moment.

After the death of their son, Apollo’s movements through New York are shaped by grief and its consequences. He is hospitalized for surgery to repair his eye, stays with Lillian while recovering, and speaks with New York City detectives and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents. Three weeks after Brian’s death, rather than return home, he goes to the Fort Washington branch of the New York Public Library with a shotgun and demands to know where Emma has gone. The standoff lasts six and a half hours; Emma’s coworkers, whom he has taken hostage, later decline to press charges and testify on his behalf. Apollo spends two months at Rikers Island. His release takes place before dawn, after eleven hours in a crowded holding area, and he is dropped at Queensboro Plaza with his belongings and enough money for a subway ride and coffee. Though the other released men head home, Apollo cannot yet return to the apartment where his family had lived.

Parole brings him back into another of the city’s public spaces. A Manhattan district court requires Apollo to attend a meeting at the Yorkville Branch of the New York Public Library, an elegant townhouse on East 79th Street. The basement room is set up in a circle, with twelve people present. Later, New York’s familiar street grid becomes a means of pursuit when Apollo follows a red dot moving across his phone’s map. It draws him through Chinatown, Little Italy, and NoLita into the East Village, then west toward Washington Square Park. The map changes as he approaches the signal, and it closes when he passes through the arch there. In this sequence, the city is at once navigable through screens and unstable underfoot: a route across known neighborhoods becomes an encounter with someone who appears to be tracking him.

The city’s revisions

The novel treats New York’s history as layered rather than settled. At Jamaica Station on the Long Island Rail Road, Apollo sees the renovated platforms, elevators, escalators, and glass canopy, as well as the older station and street level in memory. The station connects to the AirTrain serving John F. Kennedy International Airport, but its newest form does not erase what came before. Apollo’s reflections move from the Jamaica he knows to the one Lillian might have encountered as a young immigrant, and further back to a time when the area was marshland. Jamaica Avenue followed the Old Rockaway Trail used by the Rockaway and Canarsie peoples; nineteenth-century workers dredging Baisley Pond found remains of an American mastodon, commemorated by a sculpture at Sutphin Playground. Each layer revises the apparent age and meaning of the place.

The novel extends that deep time into the land beneath the city. In Jorgen Knudsen’s account, the Laurentide ice sheet reached what would become New York City about twenty thousand years ago. The glacier, a thousand feet thick at the city, reshaped the ground before melting away after lying there for twenty-five hundred years. Jorgen also tells Apollo that Nils brought a creature from Norway when he emigrated with his wife, treating it as insurance for a dangerous voyage. In his telling, Nils, Anna Sofie, and Petra Mikkelsdatter stayed in Queens while the Sloopers traveled farther upstate. The land was then farmland and forest; when the area that became Forest Park was acquired for development in 1898, its hills and pockets still left places where a large creature could hide. These are Jorgen’s explanations, but their place in the story matters: urban development has not made every part of the city legible or safe.

Wilderness and the hidden city

The novel locates New York’s wilderness inside its boroughs, not beyond them. Forest Hills contains the city’s only forest, while Forest Park offers more than five hundred acres of woods in Queens. Apollo follows an old man through residential streets, past changes in housing and neighborhood character, to the Northern Forest at the park’s edge. The landscape feels remote despite its urban surroundings. Later, Apollo searches the park for Emma, trying places such as the Carousel and the George Seuffert, Sr., Bandshell. By midday he has not found her and leaves the woods for the streets near 86th Road, in Little Norway. The walk sets domestic blocks, public parkland, and the possibility of concealment side by side.

North Brother Island sharpens that contrast. By 1981 its former patients and residents had left: smallpox patients were gone, veterans had been evacuated, and people receiving treatment for drug addiction were no longer there. Black-crowned night herons then occupied the island for more than twenty years, until they abandoned it early in the twenty-first century. Apollo discovers that women and children have returned in their place. They have made a base in the Nurses’ Residence, a four-story building completed in 1904 to house 125 nurses, repairing its ruined windows with clear plastic. They live beside the Doctor’s Cottage, whose fallen facade exposes its interior. From Apollo’s nearby apartment the island is less than four miles away, yet a short boat journey brings him to a settlement that feels outside the familiar city.

The island’s position in New York’s waterways makes it more than a hidden refuge. Cal explains that Apollo has passed from the ordinary East River into new waters and reached a different shore, a place where the world’s rules are not the same. The women and children have not simply occupied an abandoned city site; they have remade it. The return of people displaces the herons, while the island’s former hospital buildings become shelter and gathering place. New York’s abandoned infrastructure thus holds several histories at once: medical care, evacuation, wildlife, and a community beyond ordinary civic view.

Narrative significance

Across the novel, New York is not a static backdrop but a record of successive uses and arrivals. Immigrants meet and build families in Queens; a rare-book dealer searches the city’s homes for objects that preserve other worlds; public libraries, hospitals, courts, and prisons shape what happens after catastrophe. The same metropolis contains the renovated station and the mastodon’s remembered landscape, residential streets and extensive forest, the river crossing and North Brother Island. These contrasts make the supernatural less an escape from the city than a possibility concealed within its material history. New York’s age, redevelopment, and unevenly visible spaces allow the familiar map to remain true while never being the whole story.