Ten years out of Yale, with an extra degree from Oxford, Greg Marnier heads for his college reunion, jetlagged and drunk, where he bumps into an old friend who offers him an extraordinary way out.

Would you like to move to Detroit?

Greg's old friend, Robert James, is wealthy and influential, a success story of the dotcom bubble and he wants to become a player on the political stage.

His plan is to buy up several abandoned neighbourhoods in Detroit - the poster child for urban decline - and build a new America from their boarded-up ruins.

For a small investment, Marnier can turn himself into a twenty-first century pioneer.

But the realities of life on America's urban frontier soon become apparent.

For every urban misfit who's come for a fresh start there's a native Detroiter whose patch is being swallowed up by the new colonials.

Marnier finds himself caught in the middle of everyone else's battles - between local and outsider, rich and poor, black and white until an accident forces him to take sides.

This book is available to borrow from the Narromine Branch of the Macquarie Regional Library.