THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A NEW YORK TIMES READERS PICK: 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
WINNER OF THE 2024 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRIZE FOR AMERICAN FICTION
FROM ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE OF 2024
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR/FRESH AIR, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, AND TIME MAGAZINE
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023
“A
murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel . . . Charming,
smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.” —Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review
“We all need—we all deserve—this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them
In
1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the
foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find
was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it
got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of
Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and
African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe
integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth
Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to
institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor
at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on
Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
As these
characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the
people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and
what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about
what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white
establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it
is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.
Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.
