The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
9 Rating(s)
List: $48.99 | Sale: $32.34
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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
An Oprah’s Book Club Novel

Bestseller

Author: Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

Narrator: Adenrele Ojo, Karen Chilton, Prentice Onayemi

Unabridged: 29 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 08/24/2021

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

An instant New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today Bestseller • AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB SELECTION • ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021 • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTIONA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times • Time • Washington Post • Oprah Daily • People • Boston Globe • BookPage • Booklist • Kirkus • Atlanta Journal-Constitution • Chicago Public LibraryFinalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel • Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction • Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction • Nominee for the NAACP Image Award""Epic. . . . I was just enraptured by the lineage and the story of this modern African-American family. . . . I’ve never read anything quite like it. It just consumed me."" —Oprah WinfreyThe NAACP Image Award-winning poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epic—an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer—that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era. The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries—that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors—Indigenous, Black, and white—in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story—and the song—of America itself.Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

About Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award, and five poetry collections, including the NAACP Image Award-winning The Age of Phillis, also nominated for the National Book Award. 


Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on April 28, 2025

how do you just...sit down and write an 816 page book? i can barely even read them. but i wouldn't have cut a single page from this one. i don't know how to convey how incredible this book is, except to say that it's over 800 pages and i understood the purpose of all of them; that it covers several gen......more

Goodreads review by Ron on August 23, 2021

Whatever must be said to get you to heft this daunting debut novel by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, I’ll say, because “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” is the kind of book that comes around only once a decade. Yes, at roughly 800 pages, it is, indeed, a mountain to climb, but the journey is engrossing,......more

Goodreads review by Raymond on August 21, 2021

The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois is a powerful intergenerational, feminist, and womanist novel. Honorée Jeffers tells the racial and class history of this country through this book, not with a lot of facts and dates although they are there you are not inundated with it. But she tells this history......more

Goodreads review by Danielle on February 02, 2023

Note: I received a free copy of this book. In exchange here is my honest review: This book is heavy! Both physically and metaphorically. There’s a lot of trauma packed into these 797 pages. 😬 Told on several different timelines, this follows a family from its beginnings. Slavery was such a horrific t......more

Goodreads review by Rosh ~catching up slowly~ on April 11, 2025

In a Nutshell: An epic family saga spanning centuries. Filled with too many characters and too many themes. Excellent research. Fabulous in some character arcs but mostly repetitive in its agenda. I can see why this book is so highly rated, but it wasn’t for me, partly because I found the main chara......more