AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB SELECTION

Epic.... I was just enraptured by the lineage and the story of this modern African-American family.... A combination of historical and modern story--I've never read anything quite like it. It just consumed me. --Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Book Club Pick

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize - An Indie Next Pick - A New York Times Book Everyone Will Be Talking About - A People 5 Best Books of the Summer - A Good Morning America 15 Summer Book Club Picks - An Essence Best Book of the Summer - A Time 11 Best Books of the Month - A Washington Post 10 Books of the Month - A CNN Best Book of the Month - A Ms. Most Anticipated Book of the Year - A Goodreads Most Anticipated Book of the Year - A Book Page Writer to Watch - A USA Today Book Not to Miss - A Chicago Tribune Summer Must-Read - An Observer Best Summer Book - A Millions Most Anticipated Book - A Ms. Book of the Month - A Well-Read Black Girl Book Club Pick - A BiblioLifestyle Most Anticipated Literary Book of the Summer - A Deep South Best Book of the Summer - Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award

The 2020 National Book Award-nominated poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epic--an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer--that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called "Double Consciousness," a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans--the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers--Ailey carries Du Bois's Problem on her shoulders.

Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother's family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that's made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women--her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries--that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.

To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family's past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors--Indigenous, Black, and white--in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story--and the song--of America itself.

BIO

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections, including the 2020 collection The Age of Phillis, which won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She was a contributor to The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward, and has been published in the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and other literary publications. Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, whose members include fourteen U.S. presidents, and is Critic at Large for Kenyon Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at University of Oklahoma.

REVIEWS

"Triumphant. . . . Quite simply the best book that I have read in a very, very long time. . . . An epic tale of adventure that brings to mind characters you never forget: Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time, Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn. . . . The historical archives of Black Americans are too often filled with broad outlines of what happened. . . . One of the many triumphs of Love Songs is how Jeffers transforms this large history into a story that feels specific and cinematic in the telling. . . . Just as Toni Morrison did in Beloved, Jeffers uses fiction to fill in the gaping blanks of those who have been rendered nameless and therefore storyless.... [A] sweeping, masterly debut." -- Veronica Chambers, New York Times Book Review

"Poet Jeffers reinvigorates the multigenerational saga in her first novel, an audacious, mellifluous love song to an African American family.... Jeffers' lyrical cadences shimmer.... Incandescent and not to be missed." -- Lesley Williams, Booklist (starred review)

"This sweeping, brilliant and beautiful narrative is at once a love song to Black girlhood, family, history, joy, pain... and so much more. In Jeffers's deft hands, the story of race and love in America becomes the great American novel." -- Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone and Another Brooklyn

Harper  /  August 24, 2021

2.13" H x 9.13" L x 5.98" W (2.15 lbs) 816 pages