Book Description
“Masterfully rendered and mercilessly readable. Kohnstamm populates these pages with insight, hilarity, emotion, and unforgettable characters. Supersonic is a novel with so much narrative propulsion that it manages to live up to its name.” —Jonathan Evison, author of Small World and Lawn Boy
When PTA president Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth petitions to rename a Seattle elementary school after her late grandmother, she ignites a battle over the school’s future and the history of its surrounding neighborhood. Supersonic launches readers into a kaleidoscopic tale of the generations of interrelated families who breathed life into that small, hilltop community.
The story cuts in time from the arrival of white settlers’ ships to the last indigenous landowner fighting to hold on to scraps of his ancestral home and back to the school’s PTA auction. It interweaves an opioid-addicted nineteenth-century con man–cum–civic booster, a disgraced Navy seaman building an airplane that travels faster than sound, a stay-at-home dad hustling to open the city’s first legal weed shop and Sami’s grandmother, a survivor of Japanese American incarceration during World War II, who founded the school’s once-celebrated music program.
The novel traces their false starts, triumphs, and heartbreaks through the booms and busts of the Yukon gold rush, the jet age, Big Tech, and beyond. By exploring the converging and often clashing personalities that make up the dynamic soul of a place, Supersonic illuminates themes of identity, displacement, destruction, and reinvention that give rise to all great American cities.
Praise For This Book
“On the soul-of-the-city level, this is the best of all the Seattle books I know of. Supersonic is a huge achievement” —Fred Moody, author of Seattle and the Demons of Ambition“Supersonic exquisitely depicts intergenerational resilience and the human cost of progress. Heartbreaking, hilarious, incisive, and deeply relevant, Kohnstamm deftly interrogates the aspirations of a city vying for world-class status.” —Cynthia Brothers, founder Vanishing Seattle
“A dazzling, expansive new vision of the West, Supersonic is both sweeping and intimate, spanning more than a hundred years on the land now known as Seattle and recasting westward expansion through the eyes of a vivid, indelible array of characters." —Maxim Loskutoff, author of Old King
“Evocative of Richard Powers and Maria Semple in its scope, empathy, and humor, Kohnstamm's gift for distinct and unerring characterizations make Supersonic a truly epic novel of its place and time." —J. Ryan Stradal, author of Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club
“Masterfully rendered, and mercilessly readable. Kohnstamm populates these pages with insight, hilarity, emotion, and unforgettable characters. Supersonic is a novel with so much narrative propulsion that it manages to live up to its name.” —Jonathan Evison, author of Lawn Boy
