Ghalen
A Romance in Black
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 26 May 2026
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- 21,99 €
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- Pre-Order
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- 21,99 €
Publisher Description
A stellar addition to the Amistad list: a beautiful coming-of-age novel from MWA Grand Master and PEN and Edgar Award-winner Walter Mosley that explores love in all forms—romantic, familial, and platonic, centered on one Black family, including a neurodivergent man, and the found bonds that helps ground them.
One of the most acclaimed writers working today, Walter Mosley spins magic once again in this beautiful novel that explores the lives of Black characters and one remarkable family through a lens both universal and unique. It touches on the lives of those whose deepest thoughts and motivations are seldom explored—including the neurodivergent, the incarcerated, and the immigrant tortured by their past—characters who will stay with you and change how you see the world.
Ghalen, a brilliant young Black man, is the son of two seemingly mismatched parents. His mother, a gifted scientist, whose own mother expected her to exceed all the achievements in her family, and his father, a gentle cook at a small vegan restaurant, whose idiosyncratic nature shows the young woman a radically different love and understanding of life, despite his inexperience and lack of education.
His parents’ grand love story starts it all off, setting us up to follow Ghalen and his family so deeply, that each new twist and turn feels personal.
The journey through Ghalen’s coming-of-age tale, as he ventures out into the world, is marked with peaks and valleys and such a drive that you can’t help but strap in for it all, while not wanting it to end.
Lush and cinematic, with the narrative drive and indelible power of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, Ghalen is one of this bestselling, prize-winning writer’s finest achievements.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mosley (Down the River unto the Sea) stacks a distinctive coming-of-age narrative onto a tender love story. The novel begins in 1999 Los Angeles, where Jamilah Fenestra and Robert Horton meet while shopping at a farmers market and she shares her umbrella with him. A scientist and a cook, respectively, their differences complement each other—she's analytical and practical, he's creative but often "lost in places or thought"—and they raise a precocious son, Ghalen, whose world is rocked in fifth grade, when Jamilah is diagnosed with liver cancer and dies soon after. At 16, Ghalen is poised to graduate early from high school, and he works as a pastry chef with Robert at a fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills, but his future remains clouded by the loss of Jamilah, whose memories are a constant for Robert. Mosley is particularly effective at rendering the father and son's bond in her absence, and he adds grit and heartache to his depiction of Ghalen finding his way as a young man, from visiting a childhood friend in the hospital who's in police custody for assault charges to exploring sex with his first love. Mosley's relaxed pacing and rhythmic prose are deceptively simple. Readers will fall in love with this bighearted family saga.
