The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
Named a Must Read for the Summer by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Time, AARP, Town & Country, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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.
National Book Award & Best Selling Author
James McBride
James McBride is an award-winning author, musician, and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, published in 1996, has sold millions of copies and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Considered an American classic, it is read in schools and universities across the United States. His debut novel, Miracle at St. Anna, was turned into a 2008 film by Oscar-winning writer and director Spike Lee, with a script written by McBride. His 2013 novel, The Good Lord Bird, about American abolitionist John Brown, won the National Book Award for Fiction and will be a Showtime limited series in fall 2020 starring Ethan Hawke.
Literature
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
Named a Must Read for the Summer by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Time, AARP, Town & Country, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
5 Carat Soul
The stories in Five-Carat Soul—none of them ever published before—spring from the place where identity, humanity, and history converge.
Kill Em And Leave
A product of the complicated history of the American South, James Brown was a cultural shape-shifter who arguably had the greatest influence on American popular music of any artist.
Deacon King Kong
This fascinating, superbly written memoir was a Told with insight and wit, Deacon King Kong demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.
Good Lord Bird
From the bestselling author of The Color of Water and Song Yet Sung comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade—and who must pass as a girl to survive.
The Color Of Water
This fascinating, superbly written memoir was a New York Times bestseller for two years. To date it has sold sold more than 2.1 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 16 languages.
Miracle At St. Anna
Set in Italy during World War II, Miracle At St. Anna is the story of a six-year-old Italian orphan who befriends a shy, giant Negro soldier named Sam Train of the alll-black 92nd Infantry Buffalo Division.
Song Yet Sung
Song Yet Sung brings into view a world long misunderstood in American fiction: Slavery’s haunting choices, pressing both whites and blacks to search for relief in a world where all seemed to lose their moral compass.
McBride has a flair for fashioning comedy whose buoyant outrageousness barely conceals both a steely command of big and small narrative elements and a river-deep supply of humane intelligence. An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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To write to James McBride
James McBride JamesMcBride@jamesmcbride.com