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Bookseller recommendation
“Mat Johnson is an author more people need to read. In this exciting whirlwind of a novel, Black comic book artist Warren returns to Germantown, a center of Black residency in Philadelphia, after years of living abroad. Arriving back in the city where he grew up, he finds his recently deceased white father's wrecked mansion bequeathed to him. He also finds his teenage daughter, who has grown up thinking she is white. Hilarious and heart-stopping, we follow Warren as he grapples with learning how to build and rebuildโplaces, fragments of people, and relationships, with others and himself. Johnson's writing flourishes here, made all the more poignant and witty by JD Jackson's brilliant narration.”
— Margy • Loganberry Books
Summary
Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons; his marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comic shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish-American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: in the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter and she thinks she's white. Warren sets off the remake his life with a reluctant daughter he never knew and a haunted house and history he knows too well.
In their search for a new life they struggle with an unwanted house and its ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and inspire a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday that celebrates interracial love.
Mat Johnson is a novelist and graphic novelist and teaches at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. His last novel, PYM, was a book of the year in the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Salon, and several other newspapers throughout the country.
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