The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

Named a Must Read for the Summer
The New York Times - The Washington Post - The Boston Globe - Time - AARP - Town & Country - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"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.

Author: James McBride
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 08/08/2023
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.28h x 6.36w x 1.41d
ISBN: 9780593422946


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 03/01/2023 pg. 3
Booklist 05/15/2023 pg. 29
Kirkus Reviews 06/01/2023
Publishers Weekly 06/26/2023
Library Journal 07/01/2023 pg. 64
Shelf Awareness 08/04/2023

About the Author
James McBride is the author of the New York Times-bestselling Oprah's Book Club selection Deacon King Kong, the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, the American classic The Color of Water, the novels Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, the story collection Five-Carat Soul, and Kill 'Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. The recipient of a National Humanities Medal and an accomplished musician, McBride is also a distinguished writer in residence at New York University.