Description
Book SynopsisA NEW EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING NOVEL
An Oprah''s Book Club Pick
''Remarkable'' Sunday Times
''Ms. Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters'' stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison''s writing'' New York Times
''Vibrant and compassionate . . . a work of great humanity'' Marilynne Robinson
1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a better life. When Hattie marries and gives birth to her children, she raises them with grit and mettle, preparing them for a world that will challenge and wound them. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie tells the story of a mother''s monumental courage, the resilience of human spirit and the myth of the American dream.
Trade ReviewMathis traces the fates of Hattie's 12 children and grandchildren over the course of the 20th century, simultaneously capturing the voices and daily minutiae of every one of her characters ...
A complex and engrossing work that has huge commercial hit written all over ...
Remarkable. * Sunday Times *
This
fresh, powerful first novel turns the lives of Hattie's children into an epic of America in the 20th century.
Tough, truthful, wonderfully controlled writing. * The Times *
Ms. Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters' stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison's writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own - both
lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral, and capable of giving the reader nearly complete access to her characters' minds and hearts. * New York Times *
A vibrant and compassionate portrait of a family hardened and scattered by circumstance and yet deeply a family. Its language is elegant in its purity and rigor.
The characters are full of life, mingled thing that it is, and dignified by the writer's judicious tenderness towards them.
This first novel is a work of rare maturity.
Beautiful and necessary from the very first sentence. The human lives it renders are on every page lowdown and glorious, fallen and redeemed, and all at the same time. They would be too heartbreaking to follow, in fact, were they not observed in such a generous and artful spirit of hope, in a spirit of mercy, in the spirit of love.
A treasure of a novel.
