In 1972, workmen digging foundations in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, find a skeleton at the bottom of a well โ and the novel goes back forty years to Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and Black families lived side by side, to tell how it got there. At the hill's heart stand Moshe Ludlow, who integrates his theater and dance hall, and his wife Chona, who runs the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store on indefinite credit and openhanded kindness. When the state moves to seize Dodo โ a deaf Black boy orphaned by an accident โ and warehouse him in an institution, Chona and Nate Timblin, the theater's janitor and Chicken Hill's unofficial Black leader, hide him, and the whole neighborhood keeps the secret. The novel won the 2024 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
Author: James McBride ยท Original publisher: Riverhead Books (New York), 2023
