The Silver State

"Astonishing. Urza's tour of the American jurisprudence apparatus is intense and stunning. What makes it terrifying, and utterly riveting, is the cast of humans he sends into the teeth of that apparatus—people conjured with such deft perception, such deeply felt empathy, that one is physically relieved to come up from these pages and realize it is not one's own life, one's own soul, being decided. The Silver State does this wondrous and exceptional thing: it takes you into custody and will not let you go until its final and devastating revelations—and not even then. A breathtaking novel by a first-rate writer."

With The Silver State, Gabriel Urza marries a poetic legal thriller with midlife crisis noir. Written in a terrifically stylish hardboiled Great Basin lyric, the novel is an elegy for the guilty and innocent alike, particularly those destroyed by the carceral state. A scathing, mournful and long-overdue autopsy of justice in the American imagination

"This intricate, hilarious, heartbreaking novel takes us deep into the American criminal justice system, as seen by a young public defender whose clients are often condemned—by poverty, racism, addiction, and indifference—long before they enter a courtroom. THE SILVER STATE is as riveting as a thriller, yet it is also the story of a society’s ethical erosion. Asking us to think hard about what passes for “justice for all” in the 21st century, it speaks powerfully and directly to our political moment."

"Gabriel Urza has written a propulsive, hallucinatory, urgent novel—an interrogation of morality and violence, of the allure and fickleness of narrative, of the porousness between guilt and innocence within a system that casts even the most idealistic among us as unwitting—and often witting—co-conspirators. An already-complicated institution as his subject, Urza complicates it further in surprising, unsettling, and ultimately necessary ways. This book will haunt you."