Loving Day: A Novel

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Loving Day: A Novel

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK |Â NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MIAMI HERALD AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle â€¢Â NPR â€¢Â Menâ€™s Journal â€¢ The Denver Post â€¢Â Slate â€¢Â The Kansas City Star â€¢Â Time Out New YorkÂ |Â From the author of the critically beloved Pym (â€œImagine Kurt Vonnegut having a beer with Ralph Ellison and Jules Verne.â€â€”Vanity Fair) comes a ruthlessly comic and moving tale of a man discovering a lost daughter, confronting an elusive ghost, and stumbling onto the possibility of utopia.

â€œIn the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my fatherâ€™s house.â€

Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and sheâ€™s been raised to think sheâ€™s white.

Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter heâ€™s never known, in a haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers.

A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and whites, fathers and daughters, the living and the dead, Loving Day celebrates the wonders of opposites bound in love.

Praise for Loving Day

â€œIncisive . . . razor-sharp . . .Â that rare mÃ©lange: cerebral comedy with pathos. The vitality of our narrator deserves much of the credit for that. He has the neurotic bawdiness of Philip Rothâ€™s Alexander Portnoy; the keen, caustic eye of Bob Jones in Chester Himesâ€™s If He Hollers Let Him Go; the existential insight of Ellisonâ€™s Invisible Man.â€â€”The New York Times Book Review

â€œExceptional . . . To say that Loving Day is a book about race is like saying Moby-Dick is a book about whales. . . . [Mat Johnsonâ€™s] unrelenting examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in between is handled with ruthless candor and riotous humor. . . . Even when the novelâ€™s family strife and racial politics are at peak intensity, Johnsonâ€™s comic timing is impeccable.â€â€”Los Angeles Times

â€œJohnson, at his best, is a powerful comic observer [and] a gifted writer, always worth reading on the topics of race and privilege.â€™â€â€”Dwight Garner, The New York Times

â€œHilarious and touching new novel about family, identity and what it means to truly love other people . . . The disasters make us who we are, and the results can sometimes be amazingâ€”as amazing as this beautiful, triumphant miracle of a book.â€â€”NPR

â€œGiddy, biting . . . ferocious . . . Grand metaphors, unsparing social commentary, sharp characters, and sharper humor help propel the book. . . . A welcome effort from a major talent.â€â€”The Boston Globe

From the Hardcover edition.

Country	USA
Author	Mat Johnson
Binding	Paperback
EAN	9780812983661
ISBN	0812983661
Label	Spiegel & Grau
Manufacturer	Spiegel & Grau
NumberOfPages	304
PublicationDate	2016-09-06
Publisher	Spiegel & Grau
ReleaseDate	2016-09-06
Studio	Spiegel & Grau

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