The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

A Novel

    • 4.2 • 70 Ratings
    • $16.99
    • $16.99

Publisher Description

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.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2023
August 8
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
400
Pages
PUBLISHER
Penguin Publishing Group
SELLER
Penguin Random House Canada
SIZE
2.2
MB

Customer Reviews

MaryJolie614 ,

Complex to read but heartwarming

I don’t know how to feel about this book. It was not a smooth read as there was multiple plots and many characters being introduced together. It was quite hard to follow but I do understand that is the style of writing of this author who happens to be a jazz musician. The author is also half Black and Jewish.The story is about a town in USA 1930s that has Eastern European Jews, Negroes , Whites and other immigrants intersect but not really meshing together. One of the main character is able to bring all the different ethnicities together with her grocery store and she is Jewish. The story picks ups,when you meet the character around a little boy called Dodo. Once you meet him, you will want to find out how the community works together for humanitarian purposes. My thoughts, it’s not the best book I’ve read as the reviews like to say but I like the message of it at the end. How everyone matters.

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