THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A NEW YORK TIMES READERS
PICK: 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY WINNER OF THE 2024 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRIZE FOR
AMERICAN FICTION FROM ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE OF 2024 NAMED A
BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR FRESH AIR WASHINGTON POST THE NEW YORKER AND TIME MAGAZINE
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023 “A murder mystery locked inside a Great American
Novel . . . Charming smart heart-blistering and heart-healing.” —Danez Smith The New York
Times Book Review “We all need—we all deserve— this vibrant love-affirming novel that bounds
over any difference that claims to separate us.” —Ron Charles The Washington Post From James
McBride author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National
Book Award–winning 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’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black
community on Chicken Hill who worked together to keep the boy safe. As these characters’
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’s white establishment played
in it McBride shows us that even in dark times it is love and community—heaven and earth—that
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 .
