The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
A Novel
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4.2 • 49 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The lives within a small Pennsylvania town overlap and intertwine in this dramatic and tender novel. It’s the 1970s, and a strange discovery in Pottstown has awoken memories in the residents that have long laid dormant. Thinking back to 40 years earlier, they recall when their neighbourhood was home to immigrant European Jews and Black migrants from the South, including a Jewish woman named Chona who touched many of their lives, exuding kindness to everyone who entered her business. Best-selling author James McBride imbues this beautiful story with richness and sincerity. The neighbourhood itself feels like the novel’s main character, with each person we meet adding another dimension to its lush tapestry. If you appreciate warmhearted novels that take their time, you will love The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
National Book Award winner McBride (Deacon King Kong) tells a vibrant tale of Chicken Hill, a working-class neighborhood of Jewish, Black, and European immigrant families in Pottstown, Pa., where the 1972 discovery of a human skeleton unearths events that took place several decades earlier. In 1925, Moshe Ludlow owns the town's first integrated dance hall and theater with his wife, Chona, a beautiful woman who's undeterred by her polio-related disability and driven by her deep Jewish faith. Chona also runs the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, where she extends kindness and indefinite credit to her Jewish and Black customers alike. When Nate and Addie Tamblin, friends and employees of the Ludlows who are Black, approach the couple for help keeping their nephew, Dodo, from becoming a ward of the state, Chona doesn't hesitate to open her home to hide the boy from the authorities. As the racist white "good Christians" from down the hill begin to interfere, claiming to be worried about Dodo's welfare, a two-fold tragedy occurs that brings the community together to exact justice, which leads to the dead body discovered years later. McBride's pages burst with life, whether in descriptions of Moshe's dance hall, where folks get down to Chick Webb's "gorgeous, stomping, low-down, rip-roaring, heart-racing jazz," or a fortune teller who dances and cries out to God before registering her premonitions on a typewriter. This endlessly rich saga highlights the different ways in which people look out for one another.
Customer Reviews
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.