Publisher's Synopsis
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY IRENOSEN OKOJIE
By the bestselling author of The Women of Brewster Place
With its showcase homes and manicured lawns, an address in the wealthy Black American neighbourhood of Linden Hills is a symbol that you've made it. The ultimate achievement: a home on prestigious Tupelo Drive. Making your way downhill to Tupelo is irrefutable proof of your worth. But the farther down the hill you go, the emptier you become and the price of success may well be a journey down to the lowest circle of hell.
As two young friends - poets from the wrong side of town - look to earn extra money for Christmas doing odd jobs in Linden Hills, their warmth, humour and disbelief exposes the hypocrisy of life on the 'right' side of the tracks. Exploring a microcosm of race and social class, Gloria Naylor reveals the true cost of success for the lost souls of Linden Hills.
'Gloria Naylor is gifted with timeless wisdom, bottomless empathy, and limitless language. Her novels will shine a light for readers and writers for generations to come' - Tayari Jones, author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE
'Naylor's skill in weaving together culture, heartbreak, joy, magic, terror, laughter, pain, and love-which is to say, life-is extraordinary. There is something both mundane and cosmic about her writing that captures the human condition in a way that perhaps no other writer did or will' - Robert Jones, Jr., author of THE PROPHETS
Naylor has produced an ambitious novel that aspires to be nothing less than a contemporary reading of Dante's 'Inferno' ...One is quickly beguiled ... so gracefully does Naylor fuse together the epic and the naturalistic, the magical and the real - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
