Dominion
A Novel
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٤٫٢ - ٢٤ من التقييمات
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- 13٫99 US$
وصف الناشر
Long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
A Best Book of the Year: Elle, Garden & Gun, Electric Literature, Debutiful
A Must-Read: New York, People, NPR, Literary Hub, Jezebel, The Millions, Southern Living, Clarion Ledger, Southern Review of Books, BookBrowse
An Indies Introduce and Indie Next Pick
A Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch
A finalist for the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
“A razor-sharp Southern family drama.” —People
Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr., shepherd of the Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church, believes in God, his own privilege, and enterprise. He owns the barbershop and the radio station, and generally keeps an iron hand on every aspect of society in Dominion, Mississippi. He and his wife, Priscilla, have five boys; the youngest, Emanuel, is called Wonderboy—no one sings prettier, runs as fast, or turns as many heads. But Wonderboy, his father, and all the structures in place that keep them on top are not as righteous as they seem to be. And when Wonderboy is caught off guard by an encounter with a stranger, he finds himself confronted by questions he’d never imagined. His response sends shock waves through the entire community.
Priscilla and Diamond, two women who love these men, bear witness to their charms and bear the brunt of their choices. Through their eyes and their stories, Dominion offers an intricate, intimate view of how secrets control us, how shame stifles us, how silence implicates us, and how even love plays a role in the everyday violence and casual sins of the powerful.
A brilliantly crafted Black Southern family drama told with the captivating force, humor, and tenderness carried in the hearts of these women, Addie E. Citchens’s Dominion wrestles with the many brutal, sinister ways in which we are shaped by fear and patriarchy, and studies how we might yet choose to break free.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Citchens debuts with a stellar Southern drama of secrets and sin, revolving around a Baptist preacher and his family. Rev. Sabre Winfrey Jr. is Dominion, Miss.'s most prominent citizen, the linchpin of the Black community, and the owner of a barbershop, radio station, and blocks of real estate. He's also one hell of a letch. (As Citchens wryly puts it, he "believed without a shadow of a doubt that an idle mind was the devil's workshop, but an idle hand belonged on a behind.") Indeed, Sabre's sermons provide scant cover for the philandering his highly medicated wife Priscilla is powerless to rein in. But Dominion's "First Lady" has an even bigger problem: her youngest son, Emmanuel, better known as Wonderboy—a star quarterback with the singing voice of an angel—has taken up with 17-year-old Diamond Bailey, a "worldy hussy" in Priscilla's eyes. Neither she nor Diamond know how depraved Wonderboy has become or where he goes when he disappears at night, and their efforts to protect him risk repeating the sins of the father as Citchens reveals the snake coiled in the heart of Dominion's prelapsarian garden. This Faulknerian, God-troubled novel is an earthly scorcher shot through with unforgettable images (here's Priscilla describing a church banquet where tickets for seating in "heaven" and "hell" were priced according to their value: "Hell was packed, but there was only one full table in heaven"). Readers will be stunned.
