Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction
Winner of the Gotham Book Prize
One of Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of the Year"
Oprah's Book Club Pick
New York Times
Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
Named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the
New York Times, Entertainment Weekly
and
TIME
Magazine
A
Washington Post
Notable Novel
From the author of
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
,
the National Book Award–winning
The Good Lord Bird,
and the bestselling modern classic
The Color of Water
, comes one of the most celebrated novels of the year.
In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range.
The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of
Deacon King Kong
, James McBride’s funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award–winning
The Good Lord Bird
. In
, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.
As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.
Bringing to these pages both his masterly storytelling skills and his abiding faith in humanity, James McBride has written a novel every bit as involving as
and as emotionally honest as
. Told with insight and wit,
demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.