Christodora

By: Tim Murphy

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Christa Lewis, Kyla Garcia, Prentice Onayemi, Suzanne Elise Freeman, Thom Rivera, Will Damron

Length: 17 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

'An engrossing and inspiring story of loss, love and hope, set against a backdrop of art, activism and addiction.' – Observer

Moving from the Tompkins Square Riots and attempts by activists to galvanize a response to the AIDS epidemic, to the New York City of the future, Tim Murphy's Christodora recounts the heartbreak wrought by AIDS, illustrates the allure and destructive power of hard drugs, and brings to life the ever-changing city itself.

The Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple with artistic ambitions. Their neighbour, Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who was once a celebrated AIDS activist but is now a lonely addict, becomes connected to Milly's and Jared's lives in ways none of them can anticipate. Meanwhile, the couple's adopted son, Mateo, grows to appreciate the opportunities for both self-realization and oblivion that New York offers.

As the junkies and protestors of the 1980s give way to the hipsters of the 2000s and they, in turn, to the wealthy residents of the crowded, glass-towered city of the 2020s, enormous changes rock the personal lives of Milly and Jared and the constellation of people around them.

'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, author of A Little Life

©2019 Tim Murphy (P)2019 Macmillan Digital Audio

Critic reviews

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)

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 hope (Garth Greenwell)

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 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)