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What E.L. Doctorow´s World´s Fair did for the New York of the 1930s, this evocative debut novel does for the vividly crumbling New York of the 1970s. Hilarious and poignant, it is a love letter to a vanishing city, and a deeply emotional story of fathers and sons.

In 1974, with both his family and his city fracturing, thirteen-year-old Griffin Watts is recruited into his estranged father´s illicit and dangerous architectural salvage business. Small and nimble, Griffin is charged with stealing exuberantly expressive 19th-century architectural sculptures-gargoyles-right off the faces of unsung tenements and iconic skyscrapers all over town. As his father explains it, these gargoyles, carved and cast by immigrant artisans during the city´s architectural glory days, are an endangered species in this era of sweeping urban renewal.
Desperate both to connect with his father and to raise cash to pay the mortgage on the brownstone where Griffin lives with his mother and sister, he is slow to recognize that his father´s deepening obsession with preserving the architectural treasures of Beaux Arts New York is also a destructive force, imperiling Griffin´s friendships, his relationship with his very first girlfriend, and even his life.
As his father grows increasingly possessive of both Griffin´s mother and the lost city, Griffin must learn how to build himself into the person he wants to become and discover which parts of his life can be salvaged-and which parts must be let go. Maybe loss, he reflects, is the only thing no one can ever take away from you.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Advance Praise for The Gargoyle Hunters :

"In the spirit of Jonathan Lethem and J.D. Salinger, John Freeman Gill strips the mask off New York City in this poignant, incisive, irreverent novel about fatherhood, art, obsession, creation and destruction. This novel salvages so many things, not least our abiding relationship with the past. This is a wonderful, compelling debut."
- Colum McCann , National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic

" The Gargoyle Hunters is wonderful, strong, and funny, with yards and yards of beautiful writing. Its pages are full of reading pleasures.... Extraordinary."
- Annie Proulx , Pulitzer Prize-and National Book Award-winning author of The Shipping News and "Brokeback Mountain"


" John Freeman Gill´s The Gargoyle Hunters is a brilliant evocation of many things: the world of a thirteen-year-old boy, with its mixture of thoughtless destructiveness and wrenching emotion; a son´s relationship with a charismatic, architecture-loving, thieving father; the endless changes to timeless Manhattan during the crumbling, tumultuous 1970s. Funny, heartbreaking, elegiac, unforgettable-David Mitchell´s Black Swan Green meets E. B. White´s Here Is New York ."
- Gretchen Rubin , No.1 New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Project

From the Hardcover edition.

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John Freeman Gill is a native New Yorker and longtime New York Times contributor whose work has been anthologized in The New York Times Book of New York and More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times. He is the real estate editor of Avenue magazine, for which he writes "Edifice Complex," a monthly column exploring the biographies of historic New York City buildings and their occupants. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Observer, the International Herald Tribune, Premiere, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, where he won two prizes and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he received an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in New York City with his wife, three children, and a smattering of gargoyles.

From the Hardcover edition.

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