The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

The international bestseller and an Oprah Book Club pick, longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, longlisted for the Aspen Literary Prize! A breath-taking debut novel that chronicles the journey of generations of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade to our own tumultuous era. The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called Double Consciousness, a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words all too well. Ailey grows up between the City in the north and summers spent in her mother's small hometown of Chicasetta, Georgia. From an early age, she finds herself in a battle for belonging that's made all the more difficult by a hurt in her past, as well as the whispers of women - her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries - that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead. To come to terms with her identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family's past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors - indigenous, black, and white - in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story - and the song - of America itself.