The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel 2023

2023 Kirkus Prize Winner

New York Times • Washington Post • 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

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From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong & the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets & 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 & how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews & African Americans lived side by side & shared ambitions & sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe & Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater & where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona & 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 & deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle & what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill & the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love & community—heaven & earth—that sustain us.

Bringing his masterly storytelling skills & his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong & as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.