When I read the description of Coleman Hill, I thought of it more as a story about place than about family. (I first read about it when it made the Carol Shields Prize longlist—eventually it was shortlisted and, yes, I’ll soon update my progress on that reading too—and it first lodged in my mind as a must-read with the interview on Black & Published by Nikesha Elise Williams very shortly afterwards. Terrific stuff: update your podcast app!)

It conjured up images like James McBride’s Chicken Hill in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023): “a tiny area of ramshackle houses and dirt roads where the town’s blacks, Jews, and immigrant whites who couldn’t afford any better lives, set them before his warm woodstove, filled them with warm iced tea and gefilte fish.”

And Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (2022): “No New Frontier stretched before him, endless and bountiful—that was for white folks—but this new land was a few blocks at least and in Harlem a few blocks was everything. A few blocks was the difference between strivers and crooks, between opportunity and the hard scrabble.”

But Kim Coleman Foote is writing more about family. In her author’s note, she says “Coleman Hill could be ‘bio-fiction’, I guess. Or ‘faction’, the term Alex Haley used to describe Roots. But the term I prefer is ‘biomythography’, coined by Audre Lorde.”

It begins in the past, in the later-19th century: “We were born after Mancipation, see? The first Colored folks to be born citizens of these here United States. We wanted what our gov’ment promised us so bad, that we was sure nuff gon up and leave our kinfolk and friends and the only home we ever knew behind.”

(I listened to this as an audiobook but finished it on-the-page; the performance is tremendously engaging but there are also photographs in the printed copy which add another dimension to the story.)

The women’s stories are centred, so we have Celia saying this: “A man might appear all nice and sweet when he was courting, like Jim, but after you said ‘I do,’ he had the potential to become the new overseer in your house.”

But in subsequent generations, the male characters are more fully developed, more complex. And, because there are multiple narrators, readers get the opportunity to observe someone like Jebbie from both his mother’s and his partner’s perspectives. Always in an historical context.

“Then, Jim took to beating Jebbie for the littlest thing, claiming it would make him a man. The North, he said, was better for Colored men, but they still lost they lives if they fought back. A Colored man who couldn’t take life’s blows would surely see the grave before his time. But Jim’s beatings ain’t make Jebbie stronger. If anything, your boy shrank. He cried more, developed a stammer. […] Your son wasn’t born no slave and don’t go a slave name neither, Jim, you thought, and yet, you sure nuff whup him like one.”

Foote brings readers right into the narrative here, making it feel like we are the ones speaking to Jim. But, simultaneously affording the possibility that there are two sides to the speaker: her own self and the part of her that’s watching and remaining silent in that instance, the part of her that’s keeping those words to herself.

I enjoyed the linked stories in Délana R. A. Dameron’s Redwood Court (2024) in a similar way; for me, it actually read more quickly (there are some poetic elements, particularly at the beginning of Foote’s novel, in earlier decades, that required a little more attention for the first few segments, but the bulk of the novel unfolds in the mid-20th century).

It landed on my stack because of her connection with Randall Kenan (both from Chapel Hill, where originally he was her creative writing teacher) whose work I love, from start to finish.

It’s a collection of linked tales about the families who settle in the Black subdivision of Redwood Court. “At the cookout that Saturday, Weesie told anyone who bought a plate that Redwood Court, all of them, took care of they own.”

The first story from the collection to snag the attention of the literary establishment was “Work”, about Mika’s first income from selling the friendship bracelets she wove and, later, her first official job: it’s about how we earn and what that costs us, about how the people around us teach us about what we take and what we give.

This story falls rather late in the collection and, by then, readers are already wholly committed to the story of this family, to the way Délana R. A. Dameron positions her heart and invites readers to make their homes there too.

“You have the stories you’ve heard and the ones you’ve yet to hear. The ones you’ll live to tell someone else. That’s a gift that gives and gives and gives. You get to make it into something for tomorrow. You write ‘em in your books and show everyone who we are.”

Mika is the most prominent character—though the characterisation is consistently strong throughout, older and younger, male and female alike—her coming-of-age story relatable and striking the perfect balance of specific and universal.

“I was journaling now, becoming a writer. Ever since I read Anne Frank and Zlata’s diaries, I was determined that, should anything happen to me before my time, as they say, there would be a record that I lived, that we all lived, and that I crushed on boys like Roger from my band class, and fought with Mama, just like any regular girl.”

Both of these were stand-out reads for me this year and they reminded me just how rewarding it can be, to try a single novel by a writer whose work is new-to-you or whose work is new to publication.

Are you keeping your stacks fresh? Everyone has their favourites, their go-to authors and genres, but how often do you stretch beyond those? How recently have you “discovered” a new favourite, book or writer?