Ayana Mathis

Em 1923, aos quinze anos, Hattie Shepherd deixa a Geórgia para se estabelecer na Filadélfia, na esperança de uma vida melhor. Mas se casa com um homem que só lhe traz desgosto e observa indefesa quando seu casal de gêmeos sucumbe a uma doença que poderia ter sido evitada com alguns níqueis. Hattie dá à luz outras nove crianças, que cria com coragem e fervor, mas sem a ternura pela qual todos anseiam. Em lugar disso, assume o compromisso de preparar os filhos para as calamitosas dificuldades que certamente enfrentarão e de ensiná-los a encarar um mundo que não os amará nem será gentil. Contadas em doze diferentes narrativas, essas vidas formam a história da coragem monumental de uma mãe e da trajetória de uma família. Belo e inquietante, o primeiro romance de Ayana Mathis é assombroso do início ao fim — épico, angustiante, imprevisível, vibrante e cheio de vida. Uma história envolvente e cativante, um retrato marcante de uma luta tenaz diante de adversidades insuperáveis e uma celebração da resiliência do espírito humano. As doze tribos de Hattie é um romance de estreia de rara maturidade.

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A debut of extraordinary distinction: Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family. In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented.  Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave.  She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a nation. Beautiful and devastating, Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is wondrous from first to last—glorious, harrowing, unexpectedly uplifting, and blazing with life. An emotionally transfixing page-turner, a searing portrait of striving in the face of insurmountable adversity, an indelible encounter with the resilience of the human spirit and the driving force of the American dream, Mathis’s first novel heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction. 

From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie comes a searing multi-generational novel—set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama—about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival. 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.