Lost Empress

From the author of the acclaimed, PEN/Bingham Prize–winning A Naked Singularity; a shockingly hilarious novel that tackles, with equal aplomb, both America’s most popular sport and its criminal justice system.

From Paterson, New Jersey to Rikers Island to the streets of New York City, Sergio De La Pava’s Lost Empress introduces readers to a cast of characters unlike any other in modern fiction: dreamers and exiles, immigrants and night-shift workers, lonely pastors and others at the fringes of society—each with their own impact on the fragile universe they navigate. At the story’s center is Nina Gill, daughter of the aging owner of the Dallas Cowboys, who was instrumental in building her father’s dynasty. So it’s a shock when her brother inherits the team and she is left with the Paterson Pork, New Jersey’s only Indoor Football League franchise. Nina vows to take on the NFL and make the Paterson Pork pigskin kings of America. Meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles—a brilliant and lethal criminal mastermind—has gotten himself thrown into Rikers to commit perhaps the most audacious crime of all time. With grace, humor, and razor-sharp prose, De La Pava tackles everything from Salvador Dalí, Joni Mitchell, psychiatric help, and emergency medicine to religion, the many species of love, and theoretical physics, as all these threads combine to count down to an epic conclusion.