Afterhours Book Club: September, 2025

Join us as we discuss The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, a global best-selling phenomenon with over a million copies sold in the United States alone. The winner of the 2024 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and named a best book of the year by NPR Fresh Air, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and more, this is a vibrant novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them.

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. 

Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.