★ 08/14/2023

Foote debuts with a gleaming, partly fictionalized account of her family’s history. At the center are Celia Coleman and Lucy Grimes, who meet in the early 1900s on a train leaving the Jim Crow South for New Jersey and become caught in a tragic cycle of domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and poverty. Celia’s husband, Jim, left Alabama and, after establishing himself, sent for Celia and their children to join him. But Jim soon dies, leaving Celia to support her children on a maid’s salary. Celia takes up Jim’s whiskey habit to cope with the cold winters and her own grief, rage, and exhaustion. Lucy—similarly widowed and deeply religious—has a daughter who becomes pregnant by Celia’s son, Jeb—who “unlike Jim, took out his woes on his wife, not his two little sons”—resulting in a marriage that tenuously unites the two families. The women’s will to survive sustains the generations, despite the many dangers they endure—and the ones they themselves inflict. Gripping, poetic, and with a big heart, it’s a memorable work of grim determination and surprising optimism. This is book club gold. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME. (Sept.)

Shortlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction • Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize • Shortlisted for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Debut Author

A Washington Post Noteworthy Book for September • A Good Morning America Spectacular Book of the Month • A Christian Science Monitor Good Summer Reading Pick • A The Root Books By Black Authors We Can’t Wait to Read • A The Millions Most Anticipated Book • A Tertulia Best Indie Publisher Book of 2023 • A Debutiful Debut Books to Read in September • A Chicago Tribune Top Pick for Reading Season • A Boston Herald Top Pick for Fall 2023

“Coleman Hill reveals, with extraordinary depth, the journey of two families from the South to North, and their interwoven stories of pain, loss, and triumph. Pushing the narrative boundaries of fiction and family memoir, Kim Coleman Foote writes in the tradition of “biomythography,” a word coined by the late American poet and essayist Audre Lorde. Yet Kim Coleman Foote also claims new literary territory for how to piece together the fragments of the past. Formally inventive and emotionally captivating, this brilliant accomplishment will take its place among the best of its generation.” —Carol Shields Prize for Fiction Jury, 2024

“Impressive.” —Becky Meloan, Washington Post

“Coleman Hill is a masterpiece. Brilliant, vivid, heartbreaking, epic, beautiful, raw and true; a reading experience unlike anything else. This is the American story.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less Is Lost

“Puts me in the mind of a Zora Neale Hurston novel.” —Ira Porter, Christian Science Monitor

“Once in a while, a writer comes along with a brilliance that stops the breath. Kim Coleman Foote is that writer.” —Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award–winning author of Red at the Bone

“Spectacular.” —Good Morning America

“Striking . . . A chorus of nine voices narrates this richly layered multigenerational tale. . . . [A] memorable saga that graciously captures the baton of African American family fiction from Ralph Ellison and Alex Haley.” —Booklist

“A meaningful deep dive into family and power, love and survival.” —Shannon Gibney, Star Tribune

“A beautiful multigenerational novel.” —The Root

“In this sweeping and astonishing debut, Kim Coleman Foote explores complex questions of legacy and inheritance, reckoning frankly with the violence that has followed the Coleman family from slavery through emancipation and the Great Migration, but holding space for the resilience, storytelling, and second acts that also compose the family history. Coleman Hill is a gorgeous collage of history, memory, and imagination.” —Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

“Remarkable . . . Three generations come to life in poignant, beautifully rendered scenes . . . a polyvocal symphony.” —Laura Sackton, Bookpage

“Coleman Hill is a riveting two-family epic with a chorus of unforgettable voices, equal parts haunting and illuminating. They are mothers and daughters, lovers and friends, all bearing the weight of the Great Migration Promised Land's broken promises over several generations. For those of us who grew up hearing (or suffering through) the adage, ‘Mothers love their sons and raise their daughters,’ Coleman Hill boldly and tenderly tells us why.” —Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“Gripping, poetic, and with a big heart, it’s a memorable work of grim determination and surprising optimism.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“As though lit by the spirit of Audre Lorde, Kim Coleman Foote's Coleman Hill is a furnace, incandescent with characters who flare and burn, reflecting and refracting the complex ways collective trauma ripples down through the generations. Rare is a writer who bears witness to an intimate national history of violence with an unflinching eye so full of understanding. Coleman Hill is a masterful, singular debut. I loved this book.” —Asako Serizawa, author of Inheritors

“In Coleman Hill, Kim Coleman Foote crafts a mosaic of vibrant characters struggling to overcome generational curses. In doing so, she creates a novel that, though heartbreaking at times, is filled with family drama so urgent and riveting that it's hard to put down.” —Maisy Card, American Book Award–winning author of These Ghosts Are Family

“Coleman Hill feels like we are in the living room as recipients of the most vital family lore. It is top-rate storytelling from the source’s tongue. Bluesy, wholesome, and soulful. Archival and fabulistic. Trysts, triumphs, and triangles that weave together in a fine piece of patchwork mirroring the story of America itself. By the end of it, Vauxhall becomes as haloed a landscape as Winesburg, Ohio. This book will beckon you with writing so profoundly heavy that it may very well just tip itself off the shelf into your hands.” —Sidik Fofana, author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs

“This stunning debut stitches together a rich, layered narrative of two connected and conflicted African American families. These people endure misfortunes from one generation to the next, their lives offering heartfelt testimony to our ability as Black people in this country to make a way out of no way.” —Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Fat Time and Other Stories

“At once intimate and panoramic, Coleman Hill is the stunning, tapestried story of the interweaving of two families across three generations and through seven decades of American history. Kim Coleman Foote has the rare talent of completely immersing you in time and place in this extraordinary debut.” —Sarah Jessica Parker, SJP Lit

2023-08-12
A dark “biomythography”—to use a word coined by Audre Lorde, as Foote does—about the Great Migration.

Around 1916, the families of Lucy Grimes and Celia Coleman decide they’ve had enough of the South. Sick of living on and farming land that belongs to white people, they opt to move north, lured by letters from friends and neighbors who have relocated: “Us women could stay at home all day, baking blackberry pie for our husbands and children. We could have hands like the lily-white ladies in the Sears Roebuck catalog—real soft and smooth, cuz we’d cream em every night. The only cotton we’d touch would be our dresses and gloves and the babies’ diapers.” Lucy and Celia meet on a train to New Jersey, where they hope for better things. The two are unlikely friends: Lucy is gentle and retiring; Celia is “coarse” and “abrasive.” Both become widowed and are forced to raise their children alone; Celia turns to the bottle for comfort. Their relationship is destroyed after Celia catches her son, Jebbie, playing doctor with Lucy’s daughter Bertha. Jebbie and Bertha grow up to have children together, but Bertha loses a pregnancy after Celia shoves her down the stairs. The rest of Foote’s debut novel—inspired by her own family—traces the intergenerational trauma of the entwined families over the ensuing decades. There’s a great deal of focus on Celia, who is revealed to be so mean and drunk that some of her own grandchildren plot to murder her. Though this is a brutal novel, devoid of anything approaching light, Foote’s prose is excellent and her dialogue rings true. She paints a vivid picture of the community of Vauxhall, New Jersey, and sticks the landing at the end of the book. The structure is a bit scattered, and one wishes the stories that make up the novel cohered a little more, but that’s mostly nitpicking—this is a promising debut from a clearly gifted writer.

A brutally effective look at intergenerational trauma.