Carlotta Mercedes, a Black and Colombian trans woman, comes home to a gentrified Brooklyn after more than twenty years in a men's prison for a robbery she was pulled into as a teenager. The novel covers a single Fourth of July weekend on parole — family cookouts, old friends, her grown son — with everything she does shadowed by the knowledge that one violation sends her back. Loosely modeled on Ulysses, it won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Hannaham had earlier won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Delicious Foods.
Author: James Hannaham · Original publisher: Little, Brown and Company (New York), 2022
