The Unsettled
A novel
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4.4 • 11 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel—set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama—about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival
"Emotionally propulsive ... Through a chorus of distinctive and virtuosic voices, we gather the story of a mother, a daughter, and the land that both unites and divides them.”– Oprah Daily • "Showcases Ayana Mathis's grace on the page, as writer, as storyteller. A book to be read and re-read." – Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend
Two bold, utopic communities are at the heart of Ayana Mathis’s searing follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Bonaparte, Alabama – once 10,000 glorious Black-owned acres – is now a ghost town vanishing to depopulation, crooked developers, and an eerie mist closing in on its shoreline. Dutchess Carson, Bonaparte's fiery, tough-talking protector, fights to keep its remaining one thousand acres in the hands of the last five residents. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, her estranged daughter Ava is drawn into Ark – a seductive, radical group with a commitment to Black self-determination in the spirit of the Black Panthers and MOVE, with a dash of the Weather Underground’s violent zeal. Ava’s eleven-year-old son Toussaint wants out – his future awaits him on his grandmother’s land, where the sounds of cicada and frog song might save him if only he can make it there.
In Mathis’s electrifying novel, Bonaparte is both mythic landscape and spiritual inheritance, and 1980s Philadelphia is its raw, darkly glittering counterpoint. The Unsettled is a spellbinding portrait of two fierce women reckoning with the steep cost of resistance: What legacy will we leave our children? Where can we be free?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A family struggles to secure their legacy in this deeply moving novel. Unsettled by her mother’s mental instability, Ava left home as a young woman. Now a parent, she finds herself alone and desperately seeking a decent place to raise her son, Toussaint, which leads her to reconnect with the boy’s elusive father. Ayana Mathis follows up her striking debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, with a heart-wrenching portrait of three generations of Black Americans defining and defending their ideas of home. We loved spending time with Ava, Toussaint, and Ava’s mother, Dutchess, as they search for a sense of belonging in the small but increasingly gentrified town of Bonaparte, Alabama, and the racially divided city of Philadelphia. Thanks to her spot-on dialect, crackling dialogue, and lush imagery, Mathis really draws us into each different setting and time period. We couldn’t stop swiping pages as we rounded each emotional corner in this challenging, beautiful, and uplifting book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mathis (The Twelve Tribes of Hattie) offers a simmering family saga involving fraught efforts in building Black communities. In 1985, Ava Carson and her 10-year-old son, Touissant, are thrown out of their New Jersey home by her husband, Abemi Reed, after Touissant's father, former Black Panther Cass Wright, visited Ava, prompting Abemi to wrongly accuse her of an affair. She's estranged from her mother, Dutchess, and with no money or options, Ava moves with Touissant into a shelter in Philadelphia. Mathis alternates perspectives between Ava and Dutchess, who still lives in Bonaparte, Ala., the historically Black town where Ava grew up. Nobody's left in Bonaparte but Dutchess and four other old-timers, as the town's acreage has dwindled over the years and white folks continue to encroach upon their remaining land. Ava, fed up with the filthy shelter, considers leaving for Bonaparte, but instead runs into Cass, who moves her and Touissant into his communal home where he plans to run a free medical clinic. Despite Cass's allure, his strict rules grate on mother and son, especially after a police raid on the house shatters their calm. Mathis ratchets up the tension all the way to a stunning reveal, which reunites the family members for a reckoning with the truth. Readers won't want to miss Mathis's accomplished return.
