Loving Day

Loving Day

By Mat Johnson
$29.99
Quantity:
window.theme = window.theme || {}; window.theme.preorder_products_on_page = window.theme.preorder_products_on_page || [];

“The politics of his own racial mix is a topic [Johnson has] written about with discernment and a rumbling wit…Loving Day is about being blackish in America, a subject about which Mr. Johnson has emerged as satirist, historian, spy, social media trickster (follow him on Twitter) and demon-fingered blues guitarist…Johnson, at his best, is a powerful comic observer; his punches land…[He’s] a gifted writer, always worth reading on the topics of race and privilege…I loved and will never forget Warren’s definition of what a daughter is: ‘A man’s daughter is his heart. Just with feet, walking out in the world.’”

New York Times

Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons; his marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comic shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish-American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: in the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter and she thinks she's white. Warren sets off the remake his life with a reluctant daughter he never knew and a haunted house and history he knows too well.

In their search for a new life they struggle with an unwanted house and its ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and inspire a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday that celebrates interracial love.

Mat Johnson is a novelist and graphic novelist and teaches at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. His last novel, PYM, was a book of the year in the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Salon, and several other newspapers throughout the country.