The Twelve Tribes of Hattie - Hardcover

Mathis, Ayana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385350287 ISBN 13: 9780385350280

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2012

Synopsis

The newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection.

The arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

A debut of extraordinary distinction: Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family.

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a nation.

Beautiful and devastating, Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is wondrous from first to last—glorious, harrowing, unexpectedly uplifting, and blazing with life. An emotionally transfixing page-turner, a searing portrait of striving in the face of insurmountable adversity, an indelible encounter with the resilience of the human spirit and the driving force of the American dream.

About this title

Review:

"Mathis traces the fates of Hattie’s 12 children and grandchildren over the course of the 20th century, simultaneously capturing the voices and daily minutiae of every one of her characters. The understated assurance with which the 39-year-old pulls off this trick – a complex and engrossing work that has huge commercial hit written all over it – is remarkable." (Sunday Times)

"This fresh, powerful first novel turns the lives of Hattie’s children into an epic of America in the 20th century. Tough, truthful, wonderfully controlled writing." (Kate Saunders The Times)

"Ms. Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters’ stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison’s writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own ― both lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral, and capable of giving the reader nearly complete access to her characters’ minds and hearts." (Michiko Kakutani New York Times)

"‘A vibrant and compassionate portrait of a family hardened and scattered by circumstance and yet deeply a family. Its language is elegant in its purity and rigor. The characters are full of life, mingled thing that it is, and dignified by the writer’s judicious tenderness towards them. This first novel is a work of rare maturity.'" (Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of GILEAD and Orange Prize-winner of HOME)

"‘Beautiful and necessary from the very first sentence. The human lives it renders are on every page lowdown and glorious, fallen and redeemed, and all at the same time. They would be too heartbreaking to follow, in fact, were they not observed in such a generous and artful spirit of hope, in a spirit of mercy, in the spirit of love. A treasure of a novel.’" (Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of TINKERS)

Book Description:

‘The opening pages of Ayana’s debut took my breath away. I can’t remember when I read anything that moved me quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison.’ Oprah Winfrey

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0385350287
• ISBN 13: 9780385350280
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 243