Glass Century
Ross Barkan
May 6, 2025
ISBN 9798218346294 / Hardcover / 484 pages / $33.99
ISBN 9798218443351 / Paperback / 484 pages / $24.99
ISBN 9798218564438 / Ebook / 449 pages / $14.99

It's 1973 and Mona Glass, a 24-year-old amateur tennis star with a free spirit, is entangled in a long affair with her married former professor, Saul Plotz. To placate Mona's traditional parents, Saul concocts an absurd solution: stage a fake wedding, invite a few friends in on the joke, and carry on as before. The ruse works—until Saul realizes that he wants the marriage to be real, and Mona, determined to stay untethered, refuses to play along.

When the city collapses in the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, Mona trades tennis for a camera, reinventing herself as a photographer for a radical tabloid. Her lens catches a vigilante haunting New York's streets, propelling her to fame and into the orbit of a new love. Meanwhile, Saul rises in government circles, brushing up against a brash young Donald Trump and realizing too late that Mona, who is now mother to their child, Emmanuel, may have slipped beyond his reach.

Spanning from the 1970s to the pandemic era, Glass Century traces a half-century of private and public unraveling—from love affairs and secret children to terrorism, war, and the quiet persistence of grace. With sharp humor and aching insight, Ross Barkan delivers a sweeping portrait of modern America, complete with all of its illusions, ambitions, and the fragile glass through which we see ourselves.

"Absorbing . . . charged with heart-in-throat suspense . . . the amplitude of Glass Century is also its greatest strength. The people it depicts are as textured and as durable as their city."
— Wall Street Journal

"An ambitious and impressive work . . . On the deepest level, Barkan retains that sense, inherited from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen Crane, that illusions are true, in their way, and can never finally be dispelled. What is most true, in this most American of novels, is not beginnings or endings, but what keeps everything in between in motion."
— Washington Examiner

"Sparkling . . . a complex portrait of greater New York over the last half-century."
— The Brooklyn Rail

"Unflaggingly bright."
— The New Statesman

"A moving, multigenerational social novel . . . Glass Century is a corrective lens for the eye that can only see the present."
— UnHerd

"Glass Century earns its place in the canon of the New York City novel, along with Don Delillo's Underworld, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and many others."
— Jewish Book Council

"A New York epic for our time."
— Compact

"Terrific."
— Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"A feat."
— Air Mail

"A smart, stylish and original New York novel. Barkan knows the city inside and out, and Glass Century evokes the New York of the 70s as well as any recent work of fiction I can think of while also centering a powerful, decades-long love story that is as complex and believable as it is ultimately moving."
— Adelle Waldman

"Tennis and love and the city, and the insatiable fire that is history. Glass Century has it all. Barkan's novel is both a marvelous paean to NYC and a spectacularly moving novel."
— Junot Díaz

"Glass Century is old-fashioned in a good way, moving storytelling in the classic social realist style about the only taboo kink left, adultery."
— Nell Zink

"Some of the best writing about tennis that I have ever read."
— Brandon Taylor

"The soundtrack to Ross Barkan's new novel should be a wailing siren. Glass Century keeps pace with an anxious and changing New York as it tracks its protagonists from the Fear City day of the early seventies through September 11 and onward to the trauma of COVID-19. Generous and funny, this smart, expansive book kept me utterly engrossed."
— Christopher Sorrentino

"You won't be able to put it down. Ross Barkan captures 'the drift of time away from wherever you used to be.' You are all the characters, each scene engrossing as quicksand, sucking you in. It starts like an inverse Taming of the Shrew (you nearly plotz with laughing) and transforms into a profound meditation on marriage, tennis, family, politics and the vicissitudes of life. Glass Century, with its two main characters, Mona Glass and Saul Plotz, mirrors the monumental twin towers that loom in the novel: 'the ocean of dark sky pressed against the long, thick glass.'"
— Jill Hoffman

"Barkan ambitiously reconciles the restlessness and enormity of the last half century without succumbing to the pretense and superficiality of idealism or relatability. This alone is a feat, but by its end, we have become the empire and the empire has become us."
— Zain Khalid

"Glass Century is vigorous, confident, controlled, and fiercely intelligent in every line."
— Matthew Specktor