The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

From James McBride,author of the bestselling OprahΓÇÖs Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book AwardΓÇôwinning The Good Lord Birda novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them In 1972when workers in PottstownPennsylvaniawere digging the foundations for a new developmentthe last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hillthe dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize himit was Chona and Nate Timblinthe Black janitor at MosheΓÇÖs theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hillwho worked together to keep the boy safe. As these charactersΓÇÖ stories overlap and deepenit becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of whiteChristian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the townΓÇÖs white establishment played in itMcBride shows us that even in dark timesit is love and communityΓÇöheaven and earthΓÇöthat sustain us. Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery StoreJames McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.