The Twelve Tribes of Hattie A Novel

Ayana Mathis

eBook - 2012

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB 2.0 SELECTION • "A remarkable page-turner of a novel." —Chicago Tribune In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd, swept up by the tides of the Great Migration, flees Georgia and heads north. This "brutal, illuminating version of the twentieth century African-American experience belongs alongside those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston" (Newsday).Full of hope, Hattie settles in Philadelphia to build a better life. Instead she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment, and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins are lost to an illness that a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children, whom she rais...es with grit, mettle, and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them to meet a world that will not be kind. Their lives, captured here... more