“A rich and complicated New York saga . . . An exciting read . . . Christodora has the scope of other New York epics, such as Bonfire of the Vanities, The Goldfinch, and City on Fire . . . Capacious yet streamlined, it is a very fine book.” —Marion Winik, Newsday

“An ambitious, time-traveling novel textured with the detail and depth of a writer who spent years reporting from the front.” —Boris Kachka, New York (8 Books You Need to Read This August)

“Christodora . . . has got it all: drugs, sex, music, race, class, art, activism, adoption, and tears . . . [Murphy’s] prose has an easy, fluent style . . . He’s good at building scenes into dramatic, sometimes scary climaxes. He’s especially vivid on the subject of drug addiction . . . Christodora is itself a response to that isolation instinct—it’s a graceful reaching-out following what must have been, for the author, a long and tortuous reaching-within.” —Rick Whitaker, Slate

“[A] brilliantly sprawling period novel about New York in the age of AIDS . . . Richly populated and delicately nuanced, Christodora seems poised to . . . take its place on any bookshelf of literary classics about New York City.” —Allen St. John, Village Voice

“Murphy isn’t only a “gay writer,” as evidenced in his skillfully written and highly readable new novel, Christodora. He transcends such labels, writing beautifully of the human condition and on issues that touch many of our lives. Modern-day struggles with addiction, mental illness, as well as the AIDS pandemic, are written about with skill and sensitivity.” —John Francis Leonard, Advocate

“[I] fell hard for Tim Murphy’s Christodora . . . A sprawling account of New York lives under the long shadow of AIDS, it deals beautifully with the drugs that save us and the drugs that don’t.” —Olivia Laing, Guardian (Best Books of 2016)

“A big old-fashioned epic novel . . . One of the most ambitious novels I’ve read in a long time . . . The book just has tons of twists and turns all the way up to the end and you just have to keep reading.” —James Conrad, RoundTable, WAMC/Northeast Public Radio (Book Picks)

“Christodora . . . [is] this year’s most ambitious and devastating contribution to the New York City realist novel . . . It’s the beauty of [Murphy’s] storytelling that anchors this all-encompassing novel . . . It’s the rare kind of book that not only stays with you, but haunts your entire neighborhood after you read it . . . Christodora is a massive achievement.” —Christopher Bollen, Interview

“The novel captures monumental neighborhood moments as it traverses the 1980s and “90s straight into the early 2020s. The early gentrification of the area . . . and the AIDS epidemic all figure centrally in the novel, and it’s a subject Murphy is well-versed on.” —Luisa Rollenhagen, Bedford + Bowery

“Christodora locates pleasure in the interstices of seemingly multiplying apocalypses . . . The scenes here ripple with so much life . . . The novel deftly navigates an interconnected cast of Dickensian intricacy, as well, resulting in a convincingly rendered portrayal of the textures and rhythms of New York City, past and future. Murphy accomplishes this through a meticulous attention to detail . . . Even in his characters’ lowest moments, Murphy’s writing exudes exuberance . . . The novel’s power lies in [its] wide scope . . . Murphy allows us to see how AIDS has rippled out from its locus to irrevocably affect the very fabric of society. . . Christodora amounts to much more than a New York novel . . . Christodora is an accomplishment.” —Ismail Muhammad, ZYZZYVA

“[An] ambitious novel . . . Powerful and compelling. It feels deeply relevant even when it covers events set several decades in the past . . . This is a novel that abounds with ambition, but it largely succeeds in grappling with a host of grand themes.” —Tobias Carroll, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[A] must-read . . . Murphy masterfully unpacks issues of family, identity, and home across the kaleidoscopic-life stories of his characters.” —Nathan Smith, Out.com

“Several times a year, a few books are published that are so compelling and immersive they simply demand the unadulterated free time of the reader. Tim Murphy’s Christodora is one of those powerful, ambitious sagas . . . Murphy knows AIDS, and he knows New York City intimately . . . The folks who populate his pages are difficult to forget . . . Murphy’s prose is smooth, chatty, and addictive . . . Each scene is filled with atmospheric detail, period dialogue, and the intricate nuances of a character’s movement, attitude, and emotion . . . Murphy has truly outdone himself with a perceptive and accomplished novel that is captivating and immensely entertaining.” —Jim Piechota, Bay Area Reporter

“Christodora is a page-turner, the sort of sprawling novel that most people refer to as Dickensian. It is written in a heated spirit of urgency . . . Murphy has an imaginative talent for exploring the subjectivities of his characters . . . Murphy’s rough, passionate, splatter-the-walls style is filled to bursting with a reporter’s interest in different people’s lives and a novelist’s tough-tender intuition about what goes on inside their heads.” —Dan Callahan, Brooklyn Magazine

“[A] towering new novel . . . It has the scope of great literature, but Christodora is also a deeply personal chronicle from a man who knows his terrain . . . Murphy glides effortlessly among the worlds of addiction and recovery, the academic art scene, AIDS activism, and the darkened corners of mental illness . . . Christodora would make an ideal gift to yourself for this World AIDS Day, or a great Kindle stuffer for someone you love or for someone who could use a better understanding of the impact of these last thirty years.” —Mark S. King, Body

“Tim Murphy’s Christodora is one of the finest New York novels I have ever read, the book vividly captures the Manhattan of the eighties and nineties.” —Largehearted Boy

“Epic in scope, [Christodora] cannily grapples with many of the seminal touchstones of contemporary New York City life: AIDS, drugs, race, activism, gentrification, art, and ideas of progress . . . Murphy is a gifted writer who not only provides readers with an intricate plot that exerts the imagination forward, but he has also created characters who feel real through action, thought, and nuance . . . For those invested in HIV/AIDS, and the ongoing response, Christodora is a must read. It is the work of fiction many within the movement have been waiting for . . . What emerges is imagination and experience refracting onto the page. It is a beautiful—and often painful—sight to behold.” —Theodore Kerr, Lambda Literary

“This is in severe contention for my Favorite Book of 2016 . . . This sweeping tale of AIDS activists and the incredible changes they inspired is heart-wrenching, hopeful and beautiful . . . Pick it up immediately!” —Elizabeth Allen, Book Riot (The Best Books We Read in July 2016)

“[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)

“[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

“Massive and fearless . . . A sweeping and moving novel filled with vivid and complex characters who engender empathy and affection . . . Murphy’s epic family saga acts as a microcosm of the massive changes in New York City over four decades . . . Christodora is an epic told with compassion, surprising humor and a strong sense of history and pacing.” —Shelf Awareness

“An ambitious social novel informed by an extended perspective on the HIV/AIDS epidemic . . . In his debut novel, Murphy wants to bring [Larry] Kramer’s vision into the 21st century, though he goes about it with more artistry and less polemic . . . A poignant . . . exploration of a health crisis that hasn’t yet ended.” —Kirkus Reviews

“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

“Tim Murphy’s book is a masterful and panoramic story of New York City and the East Village from the 1980s to the present.” —Ira Sachs

“Christodora tells a compelling story of family, friendship, love, and loss that spans decades, but manages to fully immerse you in an important and difficult time in downtown Manhattan . . . [An] outstanding book.” —Cary Fukunaga

“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

“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

“Brilliantly kaleidoscopic . . . [A] sprawling, seething, sumptuous tale of the city’s haves and have-nots under the long shadow of AIDS . . . Murphy is exceptionally skilled at writing about addiction, the intertwining of bliss and abjection . . . Remarkable . . . 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–when, that is, they’re forced by circumstance to work together.” —Olivia Laing, Guardian

“Breathtaking . . . Transcend[s] rote narrative in favor of something more powerful . . . Murphy has created a sprawling, intimate historical novel. It is a powerful and rewarding reading experience. Stylistically challenging, emotionally devastating (both positive and negative), realistic (even when it shifts into an imagined future) and impassioned, it is one of the finest novels we are likely to encounter this year.” —Robert Wiersema, Toronto Star

“Christodora . . . captures, over three decades, how AIDS devastated the [LGBTQ] community, and continues to act like a malevolent ghost over the families, friends and lovers of those affected by the epidemic . . . [An] epic story.” —Sue Carter, Metro News (Canada)

“How does a novelist tackle New York during the AIDS crisis (and its aftermath) and hope to get it right? With real-life experience and daring . . . With an unforgettable cast of diverse characters, Murphy depicts this harrowing period with grit, humor, heart, and the audacity to look into the future and hope big.” —Three Lives & Company (Staff Favorite)

“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