The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
“Dominic Hoffman fully inhabits the characters in McBride’s fresh, vital, beautifully written historical novel, resulting in a deeply immersive listening experience…Hoffman varies his accent and intonation and delivers many different languages for the large cast of characters…with his mesmerizing performance…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
AudioFile
An August 2023 LibraryReads Pick
A New York Times bestseller
An Amazon.com bestseller
A Boston Globe Pick for Summer
An AARP Magazine Editors’ Pick of Summer Reads
A Time Magazine Pick of Best Books of 2023
A Washington Post Pick of 2023's Best Books
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Pick for Summer
Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
A New York Times Bestseller in Audio
The Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year
An AudioFile Best Audiobook of the Year
On Barack Obama's Favorite Books of the Year List
Winner of the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Fiction
A Libro.fm Audio bestseller
From James McBride, author of the bestselling Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, comesa novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them.
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.
Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.
Praise