Anyone looking for a fully immersive fictional experience to transport them out of a dismal locked-down start to the year and into another world will not be disappointed by the new novel from Jess Walter, author of the number one New York Times bestseller Beautiful Ruins. From the very first sentence of The Cold Millions, Walter plunges his readers neck-deep into the seething, riotous, kaleidoscopic underworld of 1909 Spokane, WA. A “full day’s ride from anywhere”, Spokane is “a boomtown that just kept booming, doubling in size every six years... the intersection of Frontier and Civilized, the final gasp of a thing before it turned into something else”. Unemployment is rife, the free speech riots are brewing and the town is filling up with itinerants, jobseekers and Union men fed up with paying job agencies in order to work a 12-hour day and preparing themselves to fight for the right to freedom of expression and a better life.