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Hell of a Book
Hard to describe but gripping to read: this urgent, poignant, and stylish novel is both timely and timeless. The story unfolds in two strands, the first featuring an African-American author on a book tour for his bestselling novel Hell of a Book. No matter what city he goes to, someone wants to know what he thinks about the most recent tragic police shooting on the news. But the author is afraid of saying the wrong thing. It’s not just that he wants to keep the focus on book sales (though he does), but also because he experiences daydreams so vivid he can’t always tell the difference between imagination and reality. His story converges with that of a young Black boy called The Kid who is invisible to everyone but the author, setting up one hell of an ending.
About the Book
An astounding work of fiction from a New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans, and America as a whole
In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.
As these characters’ stories build and build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.
Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists it truly becomes its title.
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