A NEW EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING NOVEL

'Remarkable' Sunday Times

'Ms. Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters' stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison's writing' New York Times

'Vibrant and compassionate . . . a work of great humanity' Marilynne Robinson

1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a better life. When Hattie marries and gives birth to her children, she raises them with grit and mettle, preparing them for a world that will challenge and wound them. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie tells the story of a mother's monumental courage, the resilience of human spirit and the myth of the American dream.

'The opening pages of Ayana's debut took my breath away. I can't remember when I read anything that moved me quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison.' Oprah Winfrey

About the Author
Ayana Mathis's first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie was a New York Times best seller and has been translated into sixteen languages. Her nonfiction has been published in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, Guernica, and Rolling Stone. 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.

Reviews
Mathis traces the fates of Hattie's 12 children and grandchildren over the course of the 20th century, simultaneously capturing the voices and daily minutiae of every one of her characters ... A complex and engrossing work that has huge commercial hit written all over ... Remarkable. * Sunday Times *
This fresh, powerful first novel turns the lives of Hattie's children into an epic of America in the 20th century. Tough, truthful, wonderfully controlled writing. * The Times *
Ms. Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters' stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison's writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own - both lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral, and capable of giving the reader nearly complete access to her characters' minds and hearts. * New York Times *
A vibrant and compassionate portrait of a family hardened and scattered by circumstance and yet deeply a family. Its language is elegant in its purity and rigor. The characters are full of life, mingled thing that it is, and dignified by the writer's judicious tenderness towards them. This first novel is a work of rare maturity.
Beautiful and necessary from the very first sentence. The human lives it renders are on every page lowdown and glorious, fallen and redeemed, and all at the same time. They would be too heartbreaking to follow, in fact, were they not observed in such a generous and artful spirit of hope, in a spirit of mercy, in the spirit of love. A treasure of a novel.



Book Information
ISBN 9780099558705
Author Ayana Mathis
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint Windmill Books
Publisher Cornerstone
Weight(grams) 245g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 21mm