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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel—set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama—about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival
"Emotionally propulsive ... Through a chorus of distinctive and virtuosic voices, we gather the story of a mother, a daughter, and the land that both unites and divides them.”– Oprah Daily • "Showcases Ayana Mathis's grace on the page, as writer, as storyteller. A book to be read and re-read." – Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend
Two bold, utopic communities are at the heart of Ayana Mathis’s searing follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Bonaparte, Alabama – once 10,000 glorious Black-owned acres – is now a ghost town vanishing to depopulation, crooked developers, and an eerie mist closing in on its shoreline. Dutchess Carson, Bonaparte's fiery, tough-talking protector, fights to keep its remaining one thousand acres in the hands of the last five residents. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, her estranged daughter Ava is drawn into Ark – a seductive, radical group with a commitment to Black self-determination in the spirit of the Black Panthers and MOVE, with a dash of the Weather Underground’s violent zeal. Ava’s eleven-year-old son Toussaint wants out – his future awaits him on his grandmother’s land, where the sounds of cicada and frog song might save him if only he can make it there.
In Mathis’s electrifying novel, Bonaparte is both mythic landscape and spiritual inheritance, and 1980s Philadelphia is its raw, darkly glittering counterpoint. The Unsettled is a spellbinding portrait of two fierce women reckoning with the steep cost of resistance: What legacy will we leave our children? Where can we be free?
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel—set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama—about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival
"Emotionally propulsive ... Through a chorus of distinctive and virtuosic voices, we gather the story of a mother, a daughter, and the land that both unites and divides them.”– Oprah Daily • "Showcases Ayana Mathis's grace on the page, as writer, as storyteller. A book to be read and re-read." – Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend
Two bold, utopic communities are at the heart of Ayana Mathis’s searing follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Bonaparte, Alabama – once 10,000 glorious Black-owned acres – is now a ghost town vanishing to depopulation, crooked developers, and an eerie mist closing in on its shoreline. Dutchess Carson, Bonaparte's fiery, tough-talking protector, fights to keep its remaining one thousand acres in the hands of the last five residents. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, her estranged daughter Ava is drawn into Ark – a seductive, radical group with a commitment to Black self-determination in the spirit of the Black Panthers and MOVE, with a dash of the Weather Underground’s violent zeal. Ava’s eleven-year-old son Toussaint wants out – his future awaits him on his grandmother’s land, where the sounds of cicada and frog song might save him if only he can make it there.
In Mathis’s electrifying novel, Bonaparte is both mythic landscape and spiritual inheritance, and 1980s Philadelphia is its raw, darkly glittering counterpoint. The Unsettled is a spellbinding portrait of two fierce women reckoning with the steep cost of resistance: What legacy will we leave our children? Where can we be free?
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the cover
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 under the nails.
“No!” Ava said. “I mean, that’s all right.”
“Mmph,” the woman said. Her heel went down on a pair of slacks as she walked away.
Inside, Cherry Street smelled of sweat and stale junk food and hair.
The waiting room was big like the DMV, with rows of plastic chairs bolted to the floor. The man at intake kept calling Ava and Toussaint up to the window to ask a single question: Names? All right, sit down. ID? Okay. Take a seat. It was grim, but it was busy. The people working there had an urgency about them, like they were fixing things, phones pressed to their ears and their desks piled with folders. In the corner of the waiting room a skinny lady rubbed Vaseline on her kid’s elbows like her life depended on it. That was a comforting sight. One monkey don’t stop no show, like the saying goes. She squeezed Toussaint’s hand. “Maybe we won’t have to wait too long,” she said.
But they did wait. An hour passed, then two. Afternoon came, or Ava guessed it was afternoon because the sun turned white and the room was broiling. The intake man called them up again to give Ava a stack of forms attached to a clipboard. When they turned back to their seats, a go-head-say-something kind of woman was sitting there next to a kid with his arm deep in a bag of Doritos. Not a free chair left in the place. There wasn’t anywhere to be but leaned up against the wall with their bags at their feet. The thick air pressed on Ava’s chest and stomach till she heaved a gob of sick into a used wad of tissues...
Reviews-
Starred review from August 21, 2023 Mathis (The Twelve Tribes of Hattie) offers a simmering family saga involving fraught efforts in building Black communities. In 1985, Ava Carson and her 10-year-old son, Touissant, are thrown out of their New Jersey home by her husband, Abemi Reed, after Touissant’s father, former Black Panther Cass Wright, visited Ava, prompting Abemi to wrongly accuse her of an affair. She’s estranged from her mother, Dutchess, and with no money or options, Ava moves with Touissant into a shelter in Philadelphia. Mathis alternates perspectives between Ava and Dutchess, who still lives in Bonaparte, Ala., the historically Black town where Ava grew up. Nobody’s left in Bonaparte but Dutchess and four other old-timers, as the town’s acreage has dwindled over the years and white folks continue to encroach upon their remaining land. Ava, fed up with the filthy shelter, considers leaving for Bonaparte, but instead runs into Cass, who moves her and Touissant into his communal home where he plans to run a free medical clinic. Despite Cass’s allure, his strict rules grate on mother and son, especially after a police raid on the house shatters their calm. Mathis ratchets up the tension all the way to a stunning reveal, which reunites the family members for a reckoning with the truth. Readers won’t want to miss Mathis’s accomplished return.
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