Brit Bennett, "The Mothers"

Unfolding with crackling, ongoing commentary from the eponymous chorus—the elderly ladies of the Upper Room Chapel—Bennett’s eagerly awaited debut is a richly plotted and sharply observed novel of three young people growing up in a small African American community in California. Seventeen, rebellious, and reeling from her mother’s suicide, Nadia gets involved with Luke, a former high school football star and son of the local preacher. The relationship is brief, but its consequences—which Nadia keeps secret from Aubrey, her best friend—haunt her through college, law school, and her return to her hometown, where the trio’s relationships are reconfigured in startling ways. Winner of the University of Michigan’s Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers, Bennett has published work in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and other literary journals.

Bennett is in conversation with Tayla Burney, a producer for The Kojo Nnamdi Show.

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Produced by Michael A. Kowaleski