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 neighbourhood where Jewish immigrants and African Americans lived side by side through the 1920s and ’30s.
In this novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them, James McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community – heaven and earth – that sustain us.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
Imprint: Weidenfeld and Nicholson UK
Publication date: 24/09/2024
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
By James McBride
Review by Harriet
This was such a slow burn read for me, but I inhaled the last half in a day, and by the end it was firmly cemented as one of my favourite novels of 2024.
Don’t worry if the proliferation of characters and tangential backstories overwhelm at first, the strands come together with McBride’s immaculate storytelling. In fact, the real revelation is the depiction of the complicated community of Chicken Hill along the way. And this is true community: with chaos and contradictions, dubious motivations, skirmishes and secrets, sitting alongside unity and cooperation. The overt racial discrimination of 1930s Pennsylvania is confronting and horrific, and the grinding struggle for scraps of power and leverage relentless, but the furious energy of the writing and the myriad forms of resistance and defiance of the community will have you whooping and weeping. I think Maureen Corrigan’s NPR review perfectly expresses what I loved about this book when she says McBride ‘...crowds the chaos of the world into his sentences.’.
