From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir
Heavy, comes a “funny,
astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about
Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity,
authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina
Mississippi.
Written in a voice
that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division
features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an
on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest,
fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight
YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his
grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a
young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.
Before leaving, City
is given a strange book without an author called Long Division.
He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City
Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version
of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump,
discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and
cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard.
They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964,
to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from
the Ku Klux Klan.
City’s two stories
ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s
house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance.
Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional
racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and
sharp” (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black
Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that
they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for
themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).