A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKÂ âĸ A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR âĸÂ WINNER OF THE GABE HUDSON PRIZE âĸ From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novelâset in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabamaâabout a mother fighting for her sanity and survival
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"Emotionally propulsive ... Through a chorus of distinctive and virtuosic voices, we gather the story of a mother, a daughter, and the land that both unites and divides them.ââ Oprah Daily âĸ "Showcases Ayana Mathis's grace on the page, as writer, as storyteller. A book to be read and re-read."Â â Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend
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Two bold, utopic communities are at the heart of Ayana Mathisâs searing follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Bonaparte, Alabama â once 10,000 glorious Black-owned acres â is now a ghost town vanishing to depopulation, crooked developers, and an eerie mist closing in on its shoreline. Dutchess Carson, Bonaparte's fiery, tough-talking protector, fights to keep its remaining one thousand acres in the hands of the last five residents. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, her estranged daughter Ava is drawn into Ark â a seductive, radical group with a commitment to Black self-determination in the spirit of the Black Panthers and MOVE, with a dash of the Weather Undergroundâs violent zeal. Avaâs eleven-year-old son Toussaint wants out â his future awaits him on his grandmotherâs land, where the sounds of cicada and frog song might save him if only he can make it there.Â
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In Mathisâs electrifying novel, Bonaparte is both mythic landscape and spiritual inheritance, and 1980s Philadelphia is its raw, darkly glittering counterpoint. The Unsettled is a spellbinding portrait of two fierce women reckoning with the steep cost of resistance: What legacy will we leave our children? Where can we be free?