BOYS

In Newman’s historical novel, a Great Depression–era Black youth loses his family to racial violence and is raised by a white family in the South.

Pete Barnes finds a terrified young Black boy named Alex Broadnax—shivering from the cold and covered in blood—hiding in his father’s milk barn in Leakesville, North Carolina. Alex witnessed the murder of his entire family by the Ku Klux Klan and is now on the run. Poppa Barnes, despite his unabashed racism, takes Alex in and puts him to work, and he grows up side by side with Pete, working the farm and attending school (albeit a segregated one for Black children). Pete quickly comes to love Alex and sees him as another brother, but Alex, by far the more thoughtful of the two, never loses sight of the distance between himself and his adopted family, a bitter awareness movingly captured by the author: “I was never a son to Poppa. Every night at dinner we thanked God for his enveloping love, but come Sunday, it was clear that love did not extend to me.” Immediately after graduating high school, both boys join the army and are sent to Europe to fight in World War II. While there, Alex is stung by the military’s refusal to acknowledge his heroism and Pete wrestles with his resentment toward his father and the Baptist faith he tries to abandon. The relationship between Alex and Pete is a profoundly complex one and is rendered with impressive subtlety by Newman, who admirably refuses any facile sentimentality. Alex is a particularly memorable protagonist—it is both fascinating and heartbreaking to see how he manages to maintain both gratitude and anger in his heart in equal measure. The novel is affecting but not cloyingly manipulative, an increasingly rare accomplishment in the field of contemporary literature.

A powerful and nuanced novel about racial tensions in 20th-century America.