The Mothers: A Novel
by Brit Bennett
Buy on AmazonIt is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken beauty. Mourning her mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. It's not serious-- until the pregnancy. As years move by, Nadia, Luke, and her friend Aubrey are living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently?
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"The Mothers follows three young adults growing up in a black Southern California community. Nadia, the protagonist, loses her mother to suicide, and finds herself making the kind of choices that will affect the rest of her life. It’s hard to say more than this about the book — which delivers lines that you’ll want to savor and read out loud — because it’s a story about secrets and betrayals, and part of the pleasure is your own sighs and gasps. It’s both intimate and epic in scope. The mothers of the novel’s title are a kind of Greek chorus — the “mothers” of the church community — but the book is really about being motherless. It hums along at a brisk, emotional pace — the kind of story that feels like it’s moving fast, but really, it’s moving deep."
NPR Books We Love — 2016 · apps.npr.org