The Riveter's Grandson
A Novel of the Mohawk Skywalkers

About this book:

High above the streets of New York, where the wind tastes of ozone and wet steel, Mitch Brant walks the four-inch flange of an I-beam six hundred feet in the air—just as his father did, and his grandfather before him. They are Mohawks from Kahnawá:ke, the "Skywalkers" who have raised the skeletons of North America's greatest cities for over a century, from the ill-fated Quebec Bridge to the towers of Manhattan. But the iron doesn't care about legacy. It only cares about balance, focus, and whether you remember that the air beneath your boots has no bottom.

In *The Riveter's Grandson*, the height is only half the story. The real drop is the one Mitch feels every time the curtain walls go up and the glass seals the iron away—erasing the names, the scars, the red-lead signatures of the men who built what the city claims as its own. Haunted by the 1907 disaster that took thirty-three men from his village in fifteen seconds, pressured by a grandfather who drove rivets in fifty-knot winds, and unmoored in a Brooklyn apartment where the elevated train rattles the windows all night, Mitch must decide what it means to carry a trade that built a world that never belonged to him.

Visceral, lyrical, and steeped in the rhythm of the gang—the clang of the pneumatic gun, the arc of a cherry-red rivet, the quiet language of men who trust each other with their lives—this is a novel about the weight we inherit, the structures we raise, and the terrifying, necessary act of stepping out onto the open steel, one boot at a time, and calling it home.