James Wood writes:

Jones likes to tell the story of a whole life, and to plant that life in a whole world. His new book offers the reader – or, certainly, the non-African-American reader – the old-fashioned opportunity to go prospecting in a relatively unfamiliar fictional land (unfamiliar not least because he often sets stories in the black communities of the 1950s and 1960s). As he did in his first collection, Lost in the City (1992), Jones here confidently lays bare street after street, family after family, marriage after marriage of his hometown, Washington DC. This is the city that received the first great migration of African Americans from the South, the fabled place ‘where, South Carolina old folks said, people threw away their dishes after every meal because it was cheaper to buy new ones.’

(LRB 21 June 2007)

Harper Perennial | paperback 399 pp. |ISBN: 9780007240838