Ayana Mathis in conversation with Angela Flournoy
The Unsettled: a novel
By Ayana Mathis
published by Alfred A Knopf
From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel—set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama. This is a story about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival.
“[A] powerful book.” —Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gilead
From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter’s squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there.
Brilliant, explosive, vitally important new work from one of America’s most fiercely talented storytellers.
Ayana Mathis first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie was a New York Times best seller, an NPR Best Book of 2013, the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. and has been translated into sixteen languages. Her nonfiction has been published in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, Guernica, and RollingStone. Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She was born in Philadelphia, and currently lives in New York City where she teaches writing in Hunter College’s MFA Program.
Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. The novel won the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize and was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and an NAACP Image Award. She is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and her nonfiction has appeared in many publications, including The Nation, The Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker.
This event is made possible by the support of the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/