The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
The Million-Copy Bestseller
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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Publisher Description
'I loved this book' BONNIE GARMUS
'A generous, compassionate book about the power of love and community' LOUISE KENNEDY
'I can't recommend this one highly enough ' HARLAN COBEN
'THIS is his best book' ANN PATCHETT
THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER
BARACK OBAMA'S BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK
AMAZON.COM #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR
BOOK OF THE YEAR IN: THE GUARDIAN, NEW YORKER, NEW YORK TIMES, TIME MAGAZINE, HARPER'S BAZAAR, OPRAH DAILY AND WASHINGTON POST
WINNER OF THE 2023 KIRKUS FICTION PRIZE
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 neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.
As the story moves back in time to the 1930s and the characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community - heaven and earth - that sustain us.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store begins in the 1970s, with the discovery of a skeleton at the bottom of a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Time then rolls back to the 1930s, where industrialisation and immigration fuel the tensions in Pottstown’s community between the white Christian establishment and the poor Jewish and Black people who live in the impoverished settlement of Chicken Hill. At the centre of this vibrant cast of characters are Moshe and Chona—the married Jewish couple who own the titular shop—and Dodo, a young disabled Black boy they secretly harbour, to protect him from being sent to an institution following the death of his mother. As the circumstances that led to the dead body in the well unfold, McBride breathes full life into the neighbours of Chicken Hill, drawing out their humanity and care for one another as they struggle to navigate the maze of racist obstacles that strew the path to prosperity, illustrating the complex social history of the time through colourful dialogue and rich details of the denizens of Pottstown’s tangled connections. Equal parts mystery, soap opera and historical fiction, and sprinkled with unexplained magic in the form of Malachi, the enigmatic Hasid dancer who warns of bad omens in the opening chapters, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is yet another masterpiece from the award-winning author.
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.
