The Unsettled

From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie,a searing multi-generational novelΓÇöset in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of BonaparteAlabamaΓÇöabout a mother fighting for her sanity and survival From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old sonToussaintarrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter’s squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested roomthe barely edible foodand the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that placeand to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her own motherDutchesssince she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between themmother and daughter are deeply entwinedbut Ava can’t forgive her sharp-toungedlarger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differentlybetter. But when ToussaintΓÇÖs fatherCassreappearsshe is swept off course by his charismaand the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhilein AlabamaDutchess struggles to keep Bonaparteonce a beacon of Black freedom and self-determinationin the hands of its last five Black residentsΓÇöfamilies whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generationsΓÇöand away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte’s venerable history and the loss of the land itselfwhich she has so arduously preserved as Ava’s inheritance. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with CassToussaint senses the danger simmering all around himΓÇöhis well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intensevolatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonapartehis home and birthrightif only he can find his way there. Brilliantexplosivevitally important new work from one of AmericaΓÇÖs most fiercely talented storytellers.