Record Palace

Set in Chicago during the late 1970s, Record Palace is an eccentric debut novel about jazz, art, race, and identity.

In hazed heat, mid-September, walking north from Chicago's Loop, telling myself I was exploring the new life, I dogged as much for tonic, gin. A sign swung beside a basement door, in, out, mirage: Record Palace: J ZZ. Inside I found Acie.

Cindy, a lean, lonely white girl, has come to Chicago to study art history, to be anywhere but where she came from—tract housing in Thousand...