Join New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award-winner James McBride as he brings his masterly storytelling skills and deep faith in humanity to his newest novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, about small-town secrets and the people who keep them, a story as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.
The event is being held on the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech, the speech and the book focused on hope, love, and community!
Registration is on Eventbrite. The ticket is $32.50, which includes the book plus tax.
THE KING ARTS COMPLEX, JEWISHCOLUMBUS’ WOMEN’S PHILANTHROPY & JEWISH COMMUNITY RELATIONS COUNCIL, and JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF GREATER COLUMBUS are Gramercy’s Community Partners for this exclusive program.
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the 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 Hill, the 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 him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian 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 town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.
James McBride is the author of the New York Times–bestselling Oprah’s Book Club selection Deacon King Kong, the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, the American classic The Color of Water, the novels Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, the story collection Five-Carat Soul, and Kill ’Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. The recipient of a National Humanities Medal and an accomplished musician, McBride is also a distinguished writer in residence at New York University.
