Winner of the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2022 Carnegie Medal Fiction, the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize
A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!
One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction One of NPR.org's Books We Love One of the New York Public Library's Best Books for Adults One of Entertainment Weekly's 15 Books you Need to Read This June On Entertainment Weekly's Must List One of The NY Post's Best Summer Reading books One of GMA's 27 Books for June One of USA Today's 5 Books Not to Miss One of Fortune's 21 Most Anticipated Books Coming out in the Second Half of 2021 One of The Root's PageTurners: It's Getting Hot in Here One of Real Simple's Best New Books to Read in 2021
An astounding work of fiction from a New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans, and America as a whole
In Jason Mott's Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott's novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.
As these characters' stories build and build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it's also about the nation's reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.
Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists it truly becomes its title.
BIO
Jason Mott has published four novels. His first novel, The Returned, was a New York Times bestseller and was turned into a TV series that ran for two seasons. He has a BFA in Fiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His poetry and fiction have appeared in various literary journals, and his most recent novel, Hell of a Book, was named the winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, 2021.
REVIEWS
"Hell of a Book more than lives up to its title. Playful, searching, raw and necessary, this writing, this voice, this novel twisted me up and turned me inside out, dazzled me, surprised me and moved me."-- Charles Yu, author of National Book Award winner Interior Chinatown
"Hell of a Book teetertotters real life and fiction in a dizzying yet dazzling exploration of exploration itself. Jason Mott brings much of what he's known for and a lot of what we do not expect to this inventive offering." --Kiese Laymon, author of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
"Hell of a Book is a love story, even if it's about a love that led to grief. Our narrator's heartbreak is what causes him to see the world through a broken lens, to the point that plot-oriented readers may find themselves frustrated. But the beauty of the novel is in the cracks that distort the plot. His conversations with The Kid lead to very real reckonings with his life, his skin color, his book. And at the end, when the narrator tries to come to terms with it all--both what's real and imagined--he realizes that being Black in America and existing is a journey of love." --Washington Post
[H] Dutton Books / June 29, 2021
1.26" H x 8.35" L x 5.91" W (0.97 lbs) 336 pages
[P] Dutton Books / June 29, 2021
0.78" H x 8.22" L x 5.57" W (0.58 lbs) 336 pages