The Turner House

Flournoy's debut novel follows the thirteen Turner children as they decide the fate of the house on Yarrow Street, on Detroit's East Side, where Francis and Viola Turner raised them over five decades. In 2008 Francis is dead, Viola — ill and unable to live alone — has moved in with her eldest son, and the house, emblem of everything the Great Migration promised this Arkansas-born family, is worth a tenth of what is still owed on it. The narrative concentrates on three siblings: Cha-Cha, the dutiful eldest, a truck driver sidelined by an accident he blames on the "haint," a presence that first haunted his father; Troy, the youngest son, a police officer cooking up an illegal scheme to profit from the sale; and Lelah, the youngest daughter, evicted and suspended from her job over a gambling addiction, who has secretly moved back into the empty house. Chapters reaching back to the 1940s show Francis and Viola's beginnings, so that each child's adult crisis reads as one generation's chapter of a longer family and civic history — of Black working-class homeownership, and of Detroit's long decline. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.

Author: Angela Flournoy · Original publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (place not established), 2015