In September 1969, in the courtyard of Brooklyn's Cause Houses, Cuffy "Sportcoat" Lambkin — a seventy-one-year-old deacon of the Five Ends Baptist Church and the project's beloved drunk — walks up to Deems Clemens, the young drug dealer he once coached in baseball, and shoots him in front of everyone. McBride unspools the shooting through the whole community: church folk, neighbors, police, mobsters, and the keepers of a buried church treasure. An Oprah's Book Club selection, the novel won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
Author: James McBride · Original publisher: Riverhead Books (New York), 2020
