December 2024 — The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride

📖 Why this book? 📖

THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
FROM ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE OF 2024
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR/FRESH AIR, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, AND TIME MAGAZINE
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023

"A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel... Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing." — Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review

"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

Published August 7, 2023

Hard to find a copy? Suggest a title or use Zip Books at your local library

💠 What can I expect? 💠

We will meet in-person after hours in Time Tested Books. Front door will be unlocked, and staff will point the way.

We catch up socially for the first 30 minutes and then start discussing the book promptly at 7pm.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️A snack to share (whatever you like!)
◾️$10 (cash or venmo, details below)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

The $10 is split between two things: our access to this Meetup platform and our access to the meeting location.

Meetup has raised its annual fees, and Time Tested Books is keeping the store open after hours for our group. You can venmo me (https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon) or bring cash.

However❕We would never want you to miss a book club discussion because of the $10, so please message me if you have any concerns

(Heads up: Time-Tested Books can run a bit warm after hot downtown days like these. 😅)

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

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, Penn-sylvania, 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.