Richard Price’s world is one in which people are forever disappointing those closest to them. In Lazarus Man, Price picks apart the minutiae of human life in one of America’s most chaotic cities, offering an ultra-realistic, inevitably depressing, but often funny depiction of life lived by people all searching for something just out of reach. Set in Harlem in 2008, the novel centres on the collapse of a five-storey tenement building in East Harlem and its aftermath. Events are presented through the eyes of four characters: Mary, a policewoman with an unusual phobia of crossing state lines; Felix, an unflappable young photographer; Royal, the grizzled owner of a funeral home; and Anthony, a broken man who sets about creating a new identity after his miraculous escape from the building.

The novel’s realism is central to its appeal. The collapse of the tenement building is based on an actual event and, reading the dedications, I noticed that various characters in the story are named after people in Price’s life. As well as being the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of a clutch of celebrated films (including Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money), Price, who was born in the Bronx, served as one of the writing team for the HBO series The Wire. He has a good ear for the rhythms and phrasing of urban speech. Characters fail to finish their own sentences, interrupt and mishear each other, all in a way that endears you to them, even when they aren’t giving the best impression of themselves.

The novel’s four sections chronicle the interactions of Mary, Felix, Royal and Anthony: Felix films a promotional video for Royal’s funeral home; Mary finds herself drawn to Anthony, who embarks on a new career as a motivational speaker; Felix discovers Anthony’s strange secret. It is mainly, however, concerned with what