From the Algonquin trails that became Broadway to the rubble of 9/11, from the Dutch traders who bought it for sixty guilders to the billionaires who reshaped its skyline, Manhattan - the world city - has been a place of reinvention for over five hundred years.

In Manhattan to the Core, acclaimed author Jonathan Miles tells the city's story not through grand linear narrative but through the accumulated force of its moments: the gossip and the architecture, the crime and the music, the riots and the waves of immigrants who built it. He gives us the Manhattan of Hamilton and Boss Tweed, of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and Stonewall, of Miles Davis and Andy Warhol, of the World Trade Center's rise and fall and rise again.

The third volume in Miles's informal trilogy about places created by strangers, Manhattan to the Core is a portrait of a city that has always been more idea than place - the most audacious urban experiment in human history, and the one that has most fully embodied modernity's promise and its terror, its dreams and its nightmares, told one glittering bite at a time.



Jonathan Miles received a first from University College, London, before being awarded his doctorate from Jesus College, Oxford. Among his books are Medusa, which was published to international acclaim and is now in pre-production for a full-length film, and St Petersburg, a Times History Book of the Year and the first volume in an informal trilogy about iconic places created by strangers. Once Upon a Time World - the second in that series - was born of Jonathan's engagement with the French Riviera stretching back over three decades. He and his wife divide their time between France and Italy.