Bøker av Ayana Mathis

"From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint's father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents--families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations--and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte's venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava's inheritance. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him--his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there.

Hatties tolv stammer av Ayana Mathis var fjorårets mesthelstøpte debut i USA. Den er en mektig fortelling om en sterk kvinne og hennesetterkommere. Vi følger Hattie og hennes familie fra 1925, når hunsom søttenåring opplever at tvillingene hennes dør av lungebetennelse syvmåneder gamle. Vi møter barna til Hattie igjen i bokens resterende kapitler,hvert barn får sin fortelling. Hattie er gift med August, og de får 11 barn sammen til tross for et hanglende ekteskap. Når de to første barna dør, setter dette tonen for Hatties liv. Det blir vanskelig forhenne å glemme dette, og det får konsekvenser for hvordan relasjonen blirmellom henne og de andre barna:Den homofiile Floyd som ikke kan leve ut legningen sin, Six, som er en ung vekkelsespredikant på Jesusturne, Ruthie, som hun har fått med elskeren Lawrence, Ella, som hun må overlate til søsteren, Alice, som kjeder seg som en frustrert frue som leverlivet sitt for å hjelpe broren Bill, Franklin, drankeren som er I Vietnam ogfår vite at han har en datter, Bell, som vil begå passivt selvmord ved ikke åfå hjelp mot tuberkulose, Cassie, som har en skjør psyke som utvikler seg tilpsykose, og til sist hennes datter Sala, som blir ivaretatt av mormor Hattie.Handlingen utspiller seg gjennom 55 år, og gir også et unikt innblikk i den store migrasjonen fra sør- til nordstatene i USA.Les mer om boken her.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'I can't remember when I read anything that moved me quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison.' Oprah Winfrey'Mathis traces the fates of Hattie's 12 children and grandchildren over the course of the 20th century .