Bøker av Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE'As big, beautiful and complicated as living itself'Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone 'I ate this up in one greedy, joyous gulp . . . Hilariously funny and quietly devastating'Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy'What is a child's body worth when it is big, Black and female - when it is under constant demand to be something other than what it naturally is? In Mecca Jamilah Sullivan's achingly beautiful coming-of-age debut, Big Girl, this body carries the weight of an entire neighbourhood . . . Big Girl triumphs as a love letter to the Black girls who are forced to enter womanhood too early - and to a version of Harlem that no longer exists' New York Times'A thrilling, big-hearted novel'Chigozie Obioma, author of An Orchestra of Minorities'There are three books on earth that I would give anything to be able to write and reread until the sun burns us up. Big Girl is one of those books'Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy'As quietly revolutionary as Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha or Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John. Resetting the conversation about girlhood, desire, bodies and appetites, this book is a revelation' Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie

"Alive with delicious prose and the cacophony of '90s Harlem, Big Girl gifts us a heroine carrying the weight of worn-out ideas, who dares to defy the compulsion to shrink, and in turn teaches us to pursue our fullest, most desirous selves without shame." -Janet MockMalaya Clondon hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings in the church's stuffy basement community center. A quietly inquisitive eight-year-old struggling to suppress her insatiable longing, she would much rather paint alone in her bedroom, or sneak out with her father for a sampling of Harlem's forbidden street foods.For Malaya, the pressures of going to a predominantly white Upper East Side prep school are compounded by the high expectations passed down over generations from her sharp-tongued grandmother and her mother, Nyela, a painfully proper professor struggling to earn tenure at a prestigious university. But their relentless prescriptions-fad diets of cottage-cheese and sugar-free Jell-O, high-cardio African dance classes, endless doctors' appointments-don't work on Malaya.As Malaya comes of age in a rapidly gentrifying 1990s Harlem, she strains to understand "ladyness" and fit neatly within the suffocating confines of a so-called "femininity" that holds no room for her body. She finds solace in the lyrical riffs of Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah, and in the support of her sensitive father, Percy; still, tensions at home mount as rapidly as Malaya's weight. Nothing seems to help-until a family tragedy forces her to finally face the source of her hunger on her own terms.Exquisitely compassionate and clever, Big Girl is "filled with everyday people who, in Mecca Jamilah Sullivan's gifted hands, show us the love and struggle of what it means to be inside bodies that don't always fit with the outside world" (Jacqueline Woodson). In tracing the perils and pleasures of the inheritance that comes with being born, Sullivan pushes boundaries and creates an unforgettable portrait of Black womanhood in America.