LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 TOURNAMENT OF BOOKS

“L.A. is where you reside. Shaky Town is where you live.”

Welcome to Shaky Town, a place invisible on maps and found only in the secret heart of its citizens.

In this masterwork of panoramic style, Lou Mathews—a former mechanic and street racer—weaves together the tragedies and glories of one eastside neighborhood in the 1980s. From a teenage girl caught in the middle of a gang war, to an Irish priest who has lost his faith and hit bottom, the characters in Shaky Town live on a dangerous fault line but remain unshakable in their connections to one another.

A luminous achievement of peerless authenticity, Shaky Town captures the grit and gold of working-class Los Angeles and lays down Matthews's marker as one of the city’s great chroniclers.