James McBride

James McBride is a musician and the author of the National Book Award–winning novel The Good Lord Bird, the bestselling American classic The Color of Water, the novels Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, the story collection Five-Carat Soul, and Kill ’Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of James McBride’s novel Deacon King Kong (Riverhead Books). Many people are affected by the shooting, and as the story deepens, it becomes clear that their lives —caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York—overlap in unexpected ways. Told with insight and wit, Deacon King Kong demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us. The New Yorker praised “The sheer volume of invention in Deacon King Kong—on the level of both character . . . and language—commands awe. […] The prose radiates a kind of chain-reaction energy.”