Everywhere you don't belong

Summary: In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn't dangerous or brilliant - he's an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home. Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil-rights-era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven a young black man in this time and place called America.

Record details

ISBN: 9781616208790
ISBN: 1616208791
Physical Description: print
264 pages ; 22 cm
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2020.
Copyright: ©2020