There There

There ThereA novelBy Tommy Orange

Tommy Orange’s “groundbreaking, extraordinary” (The New York Times) There There is the “brilliant, propulsive” (People Magazine) story of twelve unforgettable characters, Urban Indians living in Oakland, California, who converge and collide on one fateful day. It’s “the year’s most galvanizing debut novel” (Entertainment Weekly).

There There is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. It’s “masterful . . . white-hot . . . devastating” (The Washington Post) at the same time as it is fierce, funny, suspenseful, thoroughly modern, and impossible to put down. Here is a voice we have never heard—a voice full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. Tommy Orange has written a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. This is the book that everyone is talking about right now, and it’s destined to be a classic.

One chapter, which appeared earlier this year in the New Yorker, is told in the second person and describes Thomas, an alcoholic who recently lost his job as a janitor. “One of these big, lumbering Indians,” Thomas feels permanently suspended between the world of his white mother and the world of his medicine-man dad who “is one-thousand-percent Indian.” “You were white, you were brown, you were red, you were dust,” the narrator says.

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Tommy Orange