February 1, 2021

After the National Book Award long-listed The Age of Phillis, poet Jeffers returns with a debut novel tracking a Black family from Colonial times to the present. Young narrator Ailey Pearl Garfield carries the name of two august Black Americans--choreographer Alvin Ailey and her own great-grandmother--and hopes to live up to W.E.B. Du Bois's ideals. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from April 19, 2021
Poet Jeffers (The Age of Phyllis) debuts with a staggering and ambitious saga exploring African American history. Ailey Pearl Garfield, the youngest daughter of Geoff Garfield, a light-skinned Washington, D.C., physician, and Belle Driskell Garfield, a Southern school teacher, reckons with ancestral trauma while growing up in the 1980s and ’90s. Throughout, historical sketches (or “songs”) link Ailey to her ancestors: Creeks, enslaved Africans, and early Scot slave owners. Ailey follows in the footsteps of her parents, attending the southern HBCU where they met and married as undergraduates before moving north to the “City,” where Geoff attended medical school at Mecca University (a thinly veiled Howard). W.E.B. Du Bois’s theories emerge in epigraphs throughout and are sagaciously reflected in the plot, as the accounts of Ailey’s college life correspond to the “talented tenth.” Later, tragedy unfolds as Lydia, Ailey’s oldest sister who is haunted by childhood sexual abuse, succumbs to crack addiction. The multigenerational story bursts open when Ailey unearths some unknown family history during her graduate studies, as well as secrets of the Black female founder of her family’s alma mater. Themes of family, class, higher education, feminism, and colorism yield many rich layers. Readers will be floored. Agent: Sarah Burns, the Gernert Company.

May 15, 2021
A sprawling, ambitious debut novel that is as impassioned in promoting Black women's autonomy as it is insistent on acknowledging our common humanity. Ailey Pearl Garfield, the protagonist of this epochal saga, is a compelling m�lange of intellectual curiosity, scathing observation, and volatile emotion. Though her grandmother may have preferred that she join the parade of medical doctors in their family, Ailey is destined to become a historian. Her journey toward that goal, fraught with heartache, upheaval, and conflict from her childhood through adolescence and collegiate years, is interwoven with the results of her inquiry into her family history. That history is deeply rooted in the Georgia town of Chicasetta, where Ailey's Black ancestors were enslaved and exploited by a "White Man with Strange Eyes" named Samuel Pinchard, who not only brutalized and demeaned his slaves, but also haphazardly procreated with them over the decades before the Civil War. The "songs" interspersed throughout the book, chronicling in vivid, sometimes-graphic detail the antebellum lives of Ailey's forbears, are bridges linking Ailey's own coming-of-age travails in what is referred to only as the City. Precocious, outspoken, and sensitive, Ailey often tests the patience of the grown-ups in her life, especially her parents, Geoff and Belle, whose own arduous passage to love and marriage through the 1950s and '60s is among the many subplots crowding this capacious, time-traversing narrative. The story always swerves back to Chicasetta, where Ailey spends her summers, and her encounters with friends and relations, the most notable of whom is her beloved Uncle Root, a retired professor at a historically Black college where he'd first made the acquaintance of the novel's eponymous scholar/activist. In her first novel, Jeffers, a celebrated poet, manages the difficult task of blending the sweeping with the intimate, and, as in most big books, she risks stress-testing some of her own narrative threads. Still, the sturdiest of those threads can throb with haunting poignancy, as in the account of Ailey's promising-but-troubled sister, Lydia, which can stand alone as a masterful deconstruction of addiction's origins and outcomes. If this isn't the Great American Novel, it's a mighty attempt at achieving one.

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June 1, 2021
Poet Jeffers reinvigorates the multigenerational saga in her first novel, an audacious, mellifluous love song to an African American family. In alternate chapters, Jeffers traces the coming of age of her contemporary heroine, Ailey, juxtaposed against the tales of multiracial ancestors whose sufferings and blood infuse the rich Georgia soil. Jeffers' lyrical cadences shimmer across the historical chapters, echoing biblical genealogies in connecting Ailey to her roots. Her story is inseparable from those who went before, and like her beloved Uncle Root, she is destined to preserve their history. Some stories she would rather forget: the sexual abuse that will haunt Ailey and her sisters, as it did their foremothers; the indelible yet often denied connection between white masters and African slaves, resulting in family members who "pass" for white, and "color struck" Negro clubs and sororities. Yet the strength of Ailey's family bonds enable her to overcome monstrous racism and sexism to become her community's prophet. "And the Word was knowledge. And the knowledge was a sound within the flesh, which may have been the Good Lord, or may have been dead ones in Africa talking across an ocean, or our people here on this side." Incandescent and not to be missed.

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"Whatever must be said to get you to heft this daunting debut novel by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, I'll say, because The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is the kind of book that comes around only once a decade. Yes, at roughly 800 pages, it is, indeed, a mountain to climb, but the journey is engrossing, and the view from the summit will transform your understanding of America. . . . With the depth of its intelligence and the breadth of its vision, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is simply magnificent." — Ron Charles, Washington Post

"Triumphant. . . . Quite simply the best book that I have read in a very, very long time. . . . An epic tale of adventure that brings to mind characters you never forget: Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time, Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn. . . . The historical archives of Black Americans are too often filled with broad outlines of what happened. . . . One of the many triumphs of Love Songs is how Jeffers transforms this large history into a story that feels specific and cinematic in the telling. . . . Just as Toni Morrison did in Beloved, Jeffers uses fiction to fill in the gaping blanks of those who have been rendered nameless and therefore storyless. . . . A sweeping, masterly debut." — Veronica Chambers, New York Times Book Review

"The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is epic in its scope. [It] traces the story of a family, the town in Georgia where they come from, and their migration outward over generations. The word epic is overused these days, but this book was meant to be an epic and it is. . . . This is one of the most American books I have ever read. It's a book about the United States. It's a book about the legacy of slavery in this country. . . . And it's also a book about traumas and loves that sustain over generations." — Noel King, NPR

"[An] ambitious début novel, by a noted poet. . . . Jeffers amasses details, richly rendering suffering and resistance." — New Yorker

"A feat of beauty and breadth." — Time, 100 Must-Read Books of the Year

"This sweeping, brilliant and beautiful narrative is at once a love song to Black girlhood, family, history, joy, pain . . . and so much more. In Jeffers's deft hands, the story of race and love in America becomes the great American novel." — Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone and Another Brooklyn

"Stunning." — People, Top 10 Books of the Year

"A sweeping matriarchal epic that leads readers through a majestic tour of race, family, and love in America, this striking debut novel by an award-winning poet is, indeed, the Great American Novel at its finest." — Joshunda Sanders, Boston Globe's Best Books of the Year

"With The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, Jeffers has created an opus, an indelible entry to the canon of contemporary American literature and one of the foundational fictional texts of Black literature worthy of sitting alongside Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing." — Latria Graham, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Stupendously good. . . . Jeffers' renditions of Black family traditions and the burden of respectability politics are spot-on, and made me wish the book was even longer." — Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR Best Books of the Year

"As one of the most prolific poets of our time, Jeffers has penned a family saga that is just as brilliant as it is necessary, just as intimate as it is expansive. An...