Book Club - Sunday, November 24th

We will be discussing The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a novel by James McBride.

Pottstown, Pennsylvania: in the dilapidated neighborhood of Chicken Hill, where immigrant Jews and African Americans live side by side, it’s a struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America, and we see how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. A secret will come to light when a skeleton is uncovered where workers are digging the foundations for a housing development.

The author

James McBride, born September 11, 1957, is an American writer and musician. He is the recipient of the 2013 National Book Award for fiction for his novel The Good Lord Bird.

McBride is well known for his 1995 memoir, the bestselling book The Color of Water, which describes his life growing up in a large, poor American-African family led by an ethnically Jewish mother. She was strict and the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi. During her first marriage, to Rev. Andrew McBride, she converted to Christianity and became a devout Christian. The memoir, which won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, spent more than two years on The New York Times bestseller list, and has become an American classic. It is read in high schools and universities across America, has been translated into 16 languages, and sold more than 2.1 million copies.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store was published in 2023 and centers on the intertwining lives of African American, Jewish, immigrant, and white residents in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s and 30s. The novel was named 2023 Book of the Year by both Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It was also awarded the Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Jewish Fiction Award.