THE RUNAWAY
NEW YORK TIMES
BESTSELLER
A
NOTABLE BOOK• A
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
and as inventive as
.