Reddick, a young, white artist, lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a historically black Brooklyn neighborhood besieged by gentrification. He makes rent as an art handler in Manhattan and spends his free time playing basketball at the local Y. He is also the last person to see Hannah before she disappears.
When Hannah’s fiancé, scion to a wealthy Upper East Side family, refuses to call the police, Reddick sets out to discover what happened to her. The search pulls him through a dramatic cross section of New York, taking him to the heart of a many-layered mystery that, in its unraveling, shakes Reddick’s convictions and lays bare the complex power dynamics of the city.
In lyrical, addictive prose, Wil Medearis asks the question: In a metropolis that prides itself on its diversity and inclusivity, who has the final say over the future? Timely, page-turning and sweeping in vision, Restoration Heights is an exhilarating new entry in the canon of great New York novels.
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“Restoration Heights dramatizes the conflicts, resentments, and hatreds that hipsters provoke when they displace people of color from their communities. Medearis’ honest look at issues of race, money, and class is especially relevant at this moment in history when so much of the world threatens to erupt into flames.”
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Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank