The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

"With this story, McBride brilliantly captures a rapidly changing country, as seen through the eyes of the recently arrived and the formerly enslaved . . . And through this evocation, McBride offers us a thorough reminder: Against seemingly impossible odds, even in the midst of humanity's most wicked designs, love, community and action can save us." -The New York Times Book Review

"The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of the best novels I've read this year. It pulls off the singular magic trick of being simultaneously flattening and uplifting." -NPR

"[A] tour de force . . . [a] mesmerizing, moving, almost magical tale . . . [McBride] writes sentences and paragraphs that swing like jazz melodies." -The Associated Press

"Classic McBride: He doesn't shy away from bold statements about the national catastrophes of race and xenophobia, and he always gives us a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. The sugar is McBride's spitfire dialogue and murder-mystery-worthy plot machinations; his characters' big personalities and bigger storylines; his wisecracking, fast-talking humor; and prose so agile and exuberant that reading him is like being at a jazz jam session. . . . Reading McBride just feels good-we are comforted and entertained, and braced for the hard lessons he also delivers." -The Atlantic

"Sharp and nimble and warm as a wool hat, James McBride's prose seems to transcend all earthly concerns, allowing him to write with compassion, humor and authority." -The Philadelphia Inquirer

"A story of community, care, and the lengths to which we'll go for justice, McBride's tale is a wondrous ode to the strength of humanity in a small town." -Time Magazine

"Enchanting . . . [a] rich, carefully drawn portrait of a Depression-era community of African Americans and Jewish immigrants as they live, love, fight, and, of course, work." -The Boston Globe

"McBride . . . would never advance any of his books as candidates for the Great American Novel. . . . I'd like to make a case, though, for Deacon King Kong and, now, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store as better contenders for the 21st-century GAN than many other, more vaunted specimens. . . . In the words of Walt Whitman (an American writer McBride often brings to mind), they contain multitudes." -Slate