From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel--set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama--about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival A fine, powerful book.
From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a<.
Brilliant, explosive, vitally important new work from one of America\'s most fiercely talented storytellers.
He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there.
As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him--his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability.
She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte\'s venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava\'s inheritance.
Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents--families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations--and away from rapidly encroaching white developers.
But when Toussaint\'s father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living.
Ava wants to love her son differently, better.
Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can\'t forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger.
Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens.
She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there.
She is repulsed by the shelter\'s squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. --Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize- winning author of Gilead From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out.
From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel--set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama--about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival A fine, powerful book
