The Unsettled - A novel

Informationen zum Autor Ayana Mathis Klappentext "From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint's father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents--families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations--and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte's venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava's inheritance. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him--his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there. Leseprobe 1985 Philadelphia Cherry Street It tinseled down on Ava Carson clutching her two suitcases in front of the Cherry Street Intake Center for the Homeless. Ava cried out and dropped her bags. The latches unlatched when they hit the pavement and the suitcases popped their guts like a melon thrown from a great height. Visions are not real, or they aren’t real yet, but they do terrify. “Toussaint!” Ava called out. He was standing right behind her, just as he had been before the vision struck: a little boy of ten, small for his age, with both hands around the handle of his own suitcase. There they were, on a late August morning: mother and son, with three cases between them and a black trash bag bulging with their belongings. “What were you doing on that street? Why did you . . . ?” Ava paused. She was shrieking, she realized. “No,” she said. “Nothing.” She had never heard of Ephraim Avenue. Hallucinations. This is the sort of thing that happens when you haven’t slept for days and you’re so exhausted that your vision goes black at the sides where the peripheral ought to be. Ava got to to her knees and scrabbled at the things on the ground: pajamas and her silk top with a tie at the collar, and a couple of nice skirts she had managed to pack, Toussaint’s good Buster Brown school shoes and his sequined Michael Jackson glove, a few Avengers comic books. She stuffed them back into the suitcase fast as she could, only they wouldn’t fit like they had before. “Ma! You have to fold them. Ma, they’re just falling out again.” Brisk feet stepped around them. A pair of scuffed black lace-­up shoes stopped next to one of the suitcases. A woman’s head lowered into view. “You need some help, miss?” she said. Ava shook her head. “Let me help you.” Her hands swung down and hovered over Ava’s things, cracked palms, ashy knuckles, dirt...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Ayana Mathis
• Editore: Knopf
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Copertina rigida
• Pubblicazione: 03.10.2023
• EAN: 9780525519935
• ISBN: 978-0-525-51993-5
• Pagine: 336
• Dimensioni: 163 mm x 242 mm x 30 mm
• Categoria: Narrativa > Romanzi