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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel

From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah's Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, a 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. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe's theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town's white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community--heaven and earth--that sustain us.

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.

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400 pages

Average rating: 7.1

2,255 RATINGS

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Community Reviews

monicaroush
Apr 08, 2025
8, 8, 8.5, 6
sistahsonthesamepage
Mar 29, 2025
9/10 stars
McBride’s storytelling masterfully weaves together Black and Jewish histories, unspoken neighborhood truths, and the power of quiet resistance. Our members were drawn to the tenderness within the chaos — how love, loyalty, and community show up in unexpected forms. The narrative structure required a bit of patience, but the payoff was worth it. A rich, layered novel that sparked meaningful conversation about belonging, justice, and memory.
wardbunch
Mar 26, 2025
6/10 stars
Nope.
With.bdp
Feb 25, 2025
5/10 stars
I loved Deacon King Kong but unfortunately this one wasn’t for me. I enjoyed the history weaved into the story but other than that, the characters felt flat and the story kind of dragged with bits of unnecessary backstory or ruminations
CherieW
Feb 21, 2025
3/10 stars
This one took me 11 chapters to really get into. I am not fond of the writing style and found it confusing to pop a paragraph of current type events into the story. This would have been better left after the tale was complete.

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