\u201cA murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel . . . Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.\u201d \u2014Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review \u201cWe all need\u2014we all deserve\u2014this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.\u201d \u2014Ron Charles, The Washington Post From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah\u2019s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award\u2013winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe\u2019s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe. As these characters\u2019 stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town\u2019s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community\u2014heaven and earth\u2014that sustain us. Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cA murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel . . . Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.\u201d \u2014Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":12967,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","book_status":[],"book_genre":[],"class_list":["post-13929","book","type-book","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book\/13929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/book"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"book_status","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book_status?post=13929"},{"taxonomy":"book_genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book_genre?post=13929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}