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The Perishing

by Natashia Deon

Length 11 hours 21 minutes

Language English

Narrators Lisa Renee Pitts & Kevin R. Free

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Bookseller recommendation

“The story is both fable and murder mystery, alternating between past and future, and uses focus on small objects and on moments of dialogue to evoke the feel of memories, skipping forward through two very different lives. Fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Karen Russell will enjoy Deon's literary use of genre elements blended with memoir techniques, but Deon's elegy for communities of color lost to (very white notions of) progress and her exploration of many facets of personal and cultural grief also demand comparison to Ishiguro. This is a very intelligent novel that reads quickly the first time through but will bear rereading, and with Lisa Renee Pitts treating lines of dialogue not with artificially different tones or accents but with different performances of the main characters, it will be just as engaging on replay.”
— Nialle • The Haunted Bookshop

Summary

A Black immortal in 1930s Los Angeles seeks to recover the memory of her past in this visionary novel from NAACP Image Award nominee Natashia Deón
Lou, a young Black woman, wakes up in an alley in 1930s Los Angeles with no memory of how she got there or where she’s from. Taken in by a caring foster family, Lou dedicates herself to her education while trying to put her mysterious
origins behind her. She’ll go on to become the first Black female journalist at the Los Angeles Times, but Lou’s extraordinary life is about to take an even more remarkable turn. When she befriends a firefighter at a downtown boxing gym, Lou
is shocked to realize that though she has no memory of meeting him, she’s been drawing his face for years.
Increasingly certain that their paths previously crossed—and beset by unexplainable flashes from different eras haunting her dreams—Lou begins to believe she may be an immortal sent here for a very important reason, one that
only others like her can explain. Setting out to investigate the mystery of her existence, Lou must make sense of the jumble of lifetimes calling to her, just as new forces threaten the existence of those around her.
Immersed in the rich historical tapestry of Los Angeles–Prohibition, the creation of Route 66, and the collapse of the St. Francis Dam—The Perishing is a stunning examination of love and justice through the eyes of one miraculous woman whose
fate seems linked to the city she comes to call home.

Fiction Science Fiction Historical Fiction