There There: A Novel
Tommy OrangeTommy Orange has written a stunning novel that grapples with a complex & painful history, with an inheritance of beauty & profound spirituality, & with a plague of addiction, abuse, & suicide.
"There There drops on us like a thunderclap; the big, booming, explosive sound of 21st-century literature finally announcing itself. Essential." — Marlon James
Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober & trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death & has come to work at the powwow to honour his uncle’s memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos & will perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion & a spectacle of sacred tradition & pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, heroism, & loss.
"In Tommy Orange’s There There, an ambitious meditation on identity & its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time & poverty & urban life, on tradition all the more pressing because of its fragility, it is as if he seeks to reconfigure Oakland as a locus of desire & dreams, to remake the city in the likeness of his large & fascinating set of characters..." — Colm Toibin, The New York Times Book Review
There There is a wondrous & shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. It’s “masterful ... white-hot... devastating” (Washington Post) at the same time as it is fierce, funny, suspenseful, thoroughly modern, & impossible to put down. Here is a voice we have never heard — a voice full of poetry & rage, exploding onto the page with urgency & force.
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TOMMY ORANGE is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born & raised i