The Turner House
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A New York Times Notable Book • An Amazon Top 100 Editors' Pick of the Year
Named a Best Book of the Year by O, The Oprah Magazine • Entertainment Weekly • NPR • Essence • Men’s Journal • Buzzfeed • Bustle • Time Out • Denver Post • Publishers Weekly • Kirkus Reviews • BookPage • Literary Hub • Kobo • The Week • Detroit Free Press
Winner of the Paterson Fiction Prize and the Black Caucus of the ALA—1st Novelist Award
Nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Debut Author, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction
Finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Indies Choice Award
Short-listed for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Ernest Gaines Award, The Morning News Tournament of Books, the Winter Lariat List, and the Medici Book Club Prize
Long-listed for the NBCC John Leonard Prize for A Debut Novel and the Chautauqua Prize
A powerful debut, The Turner House marks a major new contribution to the story of the American family.
The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone—and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit’s East Side, and the loss of a father. The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs. But now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home and move in with her eldest son, the family discovers that the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage. The Turner children are called home to decide its fate and to reckon with how each of their pasts haunts—and shapes—their family’s future.
Praised by Ayana Mathis as “utterly moving” and “un-putdownable,” The Turner House brings us a colorful, complicated brood full of love and pride, sacrifice and unlikely inheritances. It’s a striking examination of the price we pay for our dreams and futures, and the ways in which our families bring us home.
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Community Reviews
The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
338 pages
What’s it about?
Frances and Viola Turner left Arkansas and moved to Detroit in 1945. For the next fifty years they raised thirteen children on Yarrow street on the East side of the city. Frances is gone now and Viola has taken a turn for the worse. The thirteen children will need to decide what to do with the house on Yarrow St., as they owe the bank more than the house is worth. This novel fully imagines what life on the East side of Detroit was then, and what it is now.
What did it make me think about?
The power of family, the great migration of African-Americans from the South to industrial cities, and sadness for what many inner cities have become.
Should I read it?
This book has much to recommend it, but I liked it rather than loved it.
Quote-
"Slavery. Did there ever exist a more annoying way to try to make a modern-day black man feel like his troubles were insignificant, that he should be satisfied with the sorry hand society deal him."
6 stars
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