The Twelve Tribes of Hattie: Oprah’s Book Club 2.0

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd, swept up by the tides of the Great Migration, flees Georgia and heads north. This “brutal, illuminating version of the twentieth century African-American experience belongs alongside those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston” (Newsday).

Full of hope, Hattie settles in Philadelphia to build a better life. Instead she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment, and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins are lost to an illness that a few pennies could have prevented.

Hattie gives birth to nine more children, whom she raises with grit, mettle, and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them to meet a world that will not be kind. Their lives, captured here in twelve luminous threads, tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage–and a nation’s tumultuous journey.

Don’t miss Ayana Matthis’s new novel, The Unsettled coming soon!
Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Ayana Mathis
Published: 10/08/2013
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780307949707
Pages: 320
Weight: 0.51lbs
Size: 0.68″ H x 7.96″ L x 5.24″ W

About the Author
AYANA MATHIS is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is her first novel. Originally from Philadelphia, she lives in Brooklyn.