#oprahs book club

“It’s not often we revisit a book that slipped through the cracks when it first came out (okay, or that we admit we missed a big book) but Nathan Harris’s debut The Sweetness of Waterhas turned out to be THE book of the summer – an Oprah pick, longlisted for the Booker Prize, it’s even on President Obama’s summer reading list!

So we asked critic Carole V. Bell to take a look at the book, and think about why it’s having such a moment right now. Part of it, she says, is because The Sweetness of Water "taps into America’s longstanding and profound thirst for fantasies of racial reconciliation — stories in which Black people and white people find salvation together, bonding in the face of the egregious extreme racism of others.” But there’s much more to it – which you can read here.

– Petra