“New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town! And Mark Helprin’s new near-epic novel makes it all the more marvelous. It’s got great polarized motifs—war and peace, heroism and cowardice, crime and civility, pleasure and business, love and hate, bias and acceptance—which the gifted novelist weaves into a grand, old-fashioned romance, a New York love story…Helprin does several things extraordinarily well: He fights for and wins our close sympathy for his characters, even as he delivers a full-throated rendering of life at war and life at peace (with a little of each in the other). He also pays wonderful attention to the natural world, such as that New York Spring that opens the story, the changing of seasons, dawn in France and winter in Germany during the war, such domestic matters as thirty minutes of kisses, and the rue and wonder of a great love affair. I was desperately disappointed, though, by the end of this grandly charming and deeply affecting novel—but only because it ended.”