Red at the bone - Jacqueline Woodson

THE TIMES '100 BEST SUMMER READS'

NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2020


'Sublime' Candice Carty-Williams
'An epic in miniature' Tayari Jones


'A banger' Ta-Nehisi Coates
'Generous and big-hearted' Brit Bennett

'A true spell of a book' Ocean Vuong

'A proclamation' R.O. Kwon
'A little masterpiece' Paula Hawkins
'I adored this book' Elizabeth MacNeal
'Pure poetry' Observer
'A sharply focused gem' Sunday Times
'Will remind you why you love reading' Stylist
'Haunting' Guardian
'A wonderful, tragic, inspiring story' Metro
'Prose that sings off the page... Gorgeous' Mail on Sunday
'A nuanced portrait of shifting family relationships' Financial Times
'As seductive as a Prince bop' O, The Oprah Magazine
'Razor-sharp' Vanity Fair
'Dazzling... With urgent, vital insights into questions of class, gender, race, history, queerness and sex' New York Times


An unexpected teenage pregnancy brings together two families from different social classes, and exposes the private hopes, disappointments and longings that can bind or divide us.
From the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming.


Brooklyn, 2001. It is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress - the very same dress that was sewn for a different wearer, Melody's mother, for a celebration that ultimately never took place.

Unfurling the history of Melody's family - from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to post 9/11 New York - Red at the Bone explores sexual desire, identity, class, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, as it looks at the ways in which young people must so often make fateful decisions about their lives before they have even begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.



*** ONE OF THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR FOR: New York Times; Washington Post; Time; USA Today; O, The Oprah Magazine; Elle; Good Housekeeping; Esquire; NPR; New York Public Library; Library Journal; Kirkus; BookRiot; She Reads; The Undefeated
***

Jacqueline Woodson is the author of more than two dozen award-winning books, including the 2016 New York Times-bestselling National Book Award finalist for adult fiction, Another Brooklyn, and Red at the Bone, which was longlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. Among her many accolades, Woodson is the recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, a four-time National Book Award finalist, a two-time NAACP Image Award winner and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner. Woodson was the recipient of the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the 2018 Children's Literature Legacy Award and the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition given to an author of children's books. Her New York Times-bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, received the National Book Award in 2014. She lives with her family in New York.

ONE OF THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR FOR:
New York Times
Washington Post
Time
USA Today
O, The Oprah Magazine
Elle
Good Housekeeping
Esquire
NPR
New York Public Library

Library Journal

Kirkus

BookRiot

She Reads

The Undefeated

Completely sublime and immersive, Red at the Bone will strike you in the heart. Woodson writes the beautiful complication that can be intergenerational relationships with love, and a richness that is breathtaking.
Candice Carty-Williams, bestselling author of QUEENIE

An epic in miniature... As moody, spare, and intense as a Picasso line drawing... This poignant tale of choices and their aftermath, history and its legacy, will resonate with mothers and daughters.
Tayari Jones, Women's Prize-winning author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE

Red at the Bone is a beautiful portrait of two families bonded through a teenage pregnancy and later fractured as its members follow their diverging paths. It's a generous, big-hearted novel that explores the pressures ambition and desire place on two young parents, as well as the histories they inherit that continue to shape the family for generations.
Brit Bennett, author of THE VANISHING HALF

A banger
Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of THE WATER DANCER

Red at the Bone glistens with sheer beauty.
Courttia Newland

Profound, moving and consistently unexpected... A book that embraces class, desire, race, gender, ambition and tragedy, all with exemplary subtlety... Red at the Bone is pure poetry.
Observer

Red at the Bone should be on everyone's to-read list.
Stylist (Best New Books for 2020)

A nuanced portrait of shifting family relationships... With passionate precision Woodson paints the aches and pleasures of all kinds of love: parental love, the love of friendship, sexual love... By the end of the novel the nature of [the characters'] wealth seems different than it did at the beginning of the book: as we have come to know its characters and their lives, it is their stories, not their gold, that gleam out from the darkness all around.
Financial Times - Erica Wagner

Haunting... There is an abundance of angst over class, gender and race subtly woven into this beguilingly slim novel. Woodson frames each chapter from the point of view of a different character, and the result is a narrative about an individual family that takes on communal urgency and power. She shows her readers how elliptical and obsessive human memory is... Black women and their sexuality - what is projected on to it; its weight, beauty and ease - are at the heart of Red at the Bone. Woodson seems to understand that there has never been a way for youth or love or desire to play it safe. A young girl's sexuality is hers to discover, and not her parents', nor her lovers', to assume or take away. It is the mystery that keeps unravelling, like blood, truth and memory.
Guardian

Red at the Bone is less than 200 pages long but manages to cram in the story of one black American family from the start of the 21st century to the end - and from six viewpoints too... The writing is so sensuous and deft, Woodson's characterisation so instantly wrought, that perspective changes and propulsive tumble of years become a cinch to follow... A wonderful, tragic, inspiring story. Sublime.
Metro