Crowd Sourcing: Do you have a list of all the books set in Tribeca?
R. wrote: “I recently stumbled onto the Timothy Wilde trilogy by Lyndsey Faye, crime mystery novels that take place in 1845 as NYC formed its first police force, and most of the action takes place in what is now Tribeca, with bits in Soho and Fidi. She really gives you a feel for what our neighborhood and its politics was like 180 years ago, when everything above 14th was farms and forests. Might be fun to compile a list of fiction and non-fiction that takes place in Tribeca.”
And here we are! I have to admit I could only think of a few, but I also checked with Tribecan Sid Karger, whose own novel, Best Men, features the Odeon’s ice cream stand among other New York hotspots. Hoping the comments can fill in the rest.
Bright Lights, Big City
The Odeon and other Downtown locales feature big in Jay McInerney’s now-classic from the 1980s.
Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe’s novel from 1987 travels from the South Bronx to the Upper East Side to the New York Stock Exchange in Fidi.
Triburbia
Tribeca writer Karl Taro Greenfeld’s first novel came out in 2012.
A Turn in Fortune, Heirs on Fire and lots more
Battery Park City resident Jon Pepper sets his corporate satires largely in Lower Manhattan.
City on Fire
The 2015 novel by Garth Risk Hallberg takes place in New York City in the 1970s after a Central Park shooting. It is Hallberg’s first published novel.
Let the Great World Spin
The 2009 novel by Colum McCann is set mainly in New York City and includes a fictionalized accounts of Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk across the Twin Towers, the date on which the two main events of the novel occur: a fatal car crash and a trial.
American Psycho
The black comedy horror novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991, is told in the first-person by a Manhattan investment banker who lives a double life as a serial killer. The setting is Wall Street.