Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction
From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a âfunny, astute, searchingâ (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 thatâs alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, itâs 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen âCityâ Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, heâs 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 bookâs main characters is also named City Coldsonâbut 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.
Cityâs two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmotherâs house, where he discovers the key to Baizeâs disappearance. Brilliantly âskewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racismâ (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike âsmart, funny, and sharpâ (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history âthat they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselvesâ (The Wall Street Journal).