Random family - Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Part EastEnders, part NYPD Blue, RANDOM FAMILY is compelling and tense. It teems with passion, pain and pleasure, and shows us teen drug dealers with incredible organizational and financial skills, 13-year-olds having babies to keep their boyfriends interested, and incarcerated men who find life's first peace in solitary confinement.

It's 1985 in the Bronx and teenagers Jessica and Coco are dating drug dealers and getting pregnant. Fifteen years later, they each have five children, Jessica is a grandmother and her drug-dealer boyfriend is serving a life sentence. Welcome to their world.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, a prize-winning investigative journalist, has spent a decade accompanying, empathizing with and recording the lives of a motley crew of Latinos living in the Bronx.
This extraordinary story of ordinary poor folk reads like a novel, an old-fashioned novel that is all character, dialogue and plot, albeit one whose subject matter would have made even Mrs Gaskell stutter.