The UnsettledThe Unsettled

"A searing multigenerational novel -- set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama -- about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival. From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue Family Shelter in Philadelphia, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: the filthy bathrooms, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her mother, Dutchess, since leaving her Alabama home as a young woman. Despite the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tongued, larger-than-life mother, whose intractability and bouts of despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint's father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma. The intoxicating power of his radical vision for racial justice and utopic communal living will lead her to transcendence and tragedy."-- Provided by publisher.