MEATPACKING: A Novel

Before the High Line Park there was a train that ran through their lives... Salome and her mother Max live in a Manhattan loft surrounded by Abstract Expressionist murals and views of the West Side Highway. It is a neighborhood of meatpacking plants and nightclubs and the echoes of ocean liners. Salome never learned to roller skate on cobblestones, but her playground is Mr. Zwerling's hardware store and her best friend is a man who cannot speak. is a downtown world where few children grow, where the streetlights are broken and the pay phones don't work, and her mother struggles to provide for her. Over the years Salome creates a garden of her own on the railroad viaduct, a private world that few others will understand. From World War II and the decades after, chronicles an unusual family in a once abandoned but now thriving neighborhood of New York.