Lush Life

On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Eric Cash is 35, still managing a restaurant and still serving the people he once hoped to become, his plans to be an artist, actor or screenwriter behind him. Ike Marcus, a young, good-looking bartender, seems headed somewhere, until one night two street kids confront the pair with a gun, or so Eric tells it. NYPD Detective Matty Clark takes the case. Richard Price weaves vignettes of the neighborhood and the waves of immigrants who passed through its tenements into the investigation, setting the polished new New York against the violence and control beneath it. It was Price's eighth novel.

It is on a published list of every book Barack Obama recommended during his presidency.