NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Bittersweet sexy morally fraught. -The New York Times Book Review
Luminous… engrossing and poignant this is one not to miss. -People Pick of the Week
Fantastic… a book that feels alive on the page. -The Washington Post The beloved New York
Times-bestselling novel about young love and a big secret in a small community from the author
of The Vanishing Half. Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California Brit
Bennett's mesmerizing first novel is an emotionally perceptive story about community love and
ambition. It begins with a secret. All good secrets have a taste before you tell them and if
we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths we might have noticed the sourness of
an unripe secret plucked too soon stolen and passed around before its season. It is the last
season of high school life for Nadia Turner a rebellious grief-stricken seventeen-year-old
beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide she takes up with the local pastor's son.
Luke Sheppard is twenty-one a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting
tables at a diner. They are young it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this
teen romance-and the subsequent cover-up-will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth.
As Nadia hides her secret from everyone including Aubrey her God-fearing best friend the
years move quickly. Soon Nadia Luke and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in
debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer caught in a love triangle they must
carefully maneuver and dogged by the constant nagging question: What if they had chosen
differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt. In entrancing
lyrical prose The Mothers asks whether a what if can be more powerful than an experience
itself. If as time passes we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger
selves to the communities that have parented us and to the decisions we make that shape our
lives forever.
