A powerful look at an affluent black community from Gloria Naylor (1950-2016), the National Book Award-winning author of The Women of Brewster Place
A world away from Brewster Place, yet intimately connected to it, lies Linden Hills. With its showcase homes, elegant lawns, and other trappings of Wealth, Linden Hills is not unlike other affluent black communities. But residence in this community is indisputable evidence of making it. Although no one knows what the precise qualifications are, everyone knows that only certain people get to live there - and that they want to be among them. In a resonant novel that takes as it's model Dante's Inferno, Gloria Naylor reveals the truth about the American dream - that the price of success may very well be on a journey down to the lowest circle of hell.
One is quickly beguiled . . . so gracefully to Miss Naylor fuse together the epic and the naturalistic, the magical and the real. - The New York Times
With Linden Hills, Naylor has constructed a place for herself among the leading contemporary writers of fiction. - Los Angeles Times Book Review
Every page contains a brilliant insight, a fine description, some petty and human, some grandiloquent. - Chicago Tribune
Gloria Naylor (1950-2016) grew up in New York City. She received her BA in English from Brooklyn College and her MA in Afro-American Studies from Yale University. Her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, won the National Book Award for first fiction in 1983. She is also the author of Linden Hills (available from Penguin), Mama Day, Bailey's Cafe, and The Men of Brewster Place.
Tayari Jones (foreword) is the New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage, which was an Oprah's Book Club Selection and a favorite of Barack Obama, as well as Silver Sparrow, The Untelling, and Leaving Atlanta. She is a professor-at-large at Cornell University and a professor of creative writing at Emory University.
