Squat

de Taylor Field

Field (Mercy Streets), a pastor on Manhattan's Lower East Side, sets his first novel in a homeless community just blocks from Wall Street. Characters with names like Bonehead, Unc and Ratchet sleep in abandoned buildings (or squats, thus the name), subsisting from one meal (or one drink) to the next in what Field paints believably as an almost inescapable universe worlds away from the lives of middle-class New Yorkers.