The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations in a family divided between the North and the South in 1980s America. It makes a strong case for the fact that the past can never truly be shaken off. The book follows three central characters across time and space: the emotionally delicate Ava, a young mother trying to create a sense of home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia; her charismatic and formidable mother, Dutchess, who still lives in Ava’s tiny, all-Black hometown in Alabama; and Ava’s precocious son, Toussaint, who inexplicably heads back to Alabama when every other person of color is heading north. Toussaint is named for the formerly enslaved Haitian general who led the Haitian Revolution and became a hero in the African diaspora. Bonaparte itself is reminiscent of Alabama’s historic Africatown, founded by descendants of the stolen passengers on the slave ship Clotilda, and these historical references are sprinkled throughout. Ava is recruited for a commune of sorts in Philadelphia while Dutchess is trying to save Bonaparte from white supremacists seeking to displace her from her land, which has been occupied by formerly enslaved African Americans since Reconstruction. She is the stronger of the two, but the stories are interwoven and connected to American history, culminating with the 1985 bombing by the Philadelphia Police Department of the West Philadelphia rowhouse that was home to MOVE, a collective of radical Black activists. While the topics are heavy, the prose is light, and it is a very good read.