Praise for WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG, forthcoming in 2014

As bombs fall in Japan, personal tragedy explodes the life of young, Wonder Woman-obsessed Wally Baker. Through Wally and her glamorous doctor mother, Elizabeth Gaffney movingly explores the emotional sacrifices made by strong women on the home front, war-time passions, and the atomically wounding power of secrets. Like Brooklyn Heights before the developers swarmed in, this novel is dignified and fierce, a work of complex and unconventional beauty.
   —Sheri Holman, author of
    Witches on the Road Tonight and The Dress Lodger

Praise for METROPOLIS

Gaffney has engineered a thrilling Brooklyn Bridge of a novel, at once old-fashioned and utterly modern, grand and charming, elegant and massive, imposing and delightful, carrying us in inimitable style across the rich, rank waters of New York City’s history.
  —Michael Chabon, author of
    The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Exuberant.
  — Thomas Mallon, author of Henry and Clara
    The New Yorker

A towering work of brilliant imagination, as exquisitely written as it is intricately constructed. Metropolis, with all its brawn and brains and heart, will no doubt find its way into the skyline of the greatest of the great New York City classics.
  — David Grand, author of The Disappearing Body

Trust the excellent Elizabeth Gaffney—in her debut novel no less—to use the best of both history and her own considerable powers of creation to construct this compelling tale of a young immigrant's journey through the chaotic underbelly of post-Civil War New York. The star of Gaffney’s dazzling show may be male, but the true heroes are the crafty, clever and resilient female cast members who with their own 19th-century brand of girl-gang feminism help to reinvent the world.
  — Helen Schulman, author of P.S. and The Revisionist

Elizabeth Gaffney’s Metropolis is vibrant, richly detailed, and compellingly plotted. The territory of her late 19th-century underworld resembles that of Gangs of New York or Frederick Busch’s The Night Inspector, but the sensibility is all her own, and her characters are unforgettable.
  — Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and Servants of the Map

What an absorbing experience to visit Elizabeth Gaffney’s imagination while it shakes, shimmers and sizzles with extraordinary storytelling against the backdrop of history.
— Anna Deavere Smith, author of Fires in the Mirror and Talk to Me

Gaffney has crafted an engrossing fable, smoothly told, fraught with suspense, and all the more poignant for the social issues it illuminates—issues that, as the book’s last lingering images suggest, must be resolved again and again by each succeeding generation.
  — Nicholas Rinaldi, Elle, March 2005