Strivers

A sly, thrilling novel of a murder that rocks Manhattan’s Black elite at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, making them question who they are, what they want, and where the bodies are buried—from the award-winning author of Conjure Women

What I won’t tell ’em is this—

Seventy-seven-year-old Nadine Singleton isn’t going to give her grand-niece’s documentary film crew what they want. Sweating under camera lights, she’s had it with their questions about the skeletons hidden in every closet of the once-magnificent Mulberry Estate in Harlem—until a construction man finds a literal one, bones bleached with age, in the basement wall.

And then she has to tell the story.

It’s 1926 and when the sun goes down, 131st Street at Singleton’s, an underground speakeasy run by a young Nadine. Though she was once primly behaved, as one of Manhattan’s few Black debutantes, Nadine is now, to her mother’s great dismay, a bootlegging hedonist in men’s clothes, and the life of the clandestine party scene—but it all comes crashing down when her lover’s body turns up dead on the club’s doorstep. Frantic with grief but equally desperate to protect her speakeasy, she arranges for the body to be moved, setting off a chain of events that will shape the rest of her life.

As the search for the killer heats up, Nadine’s not the only one with secrets. August, her brother and business partner, is scarred from the war and wetting his beak in more ways than one. A crooked detective is desperate to solve the case to protect his reputation. A wealthy white woman is claiming to speak for the dead. A thief is stealing names and trying them on for size. And as Nadine’s dreams fall to pieces, she just wants to understand how everything went so wrong.

Taut, twisty, and sophisticated, Strivers brings to life a glittering, Gatsby-esque world—and its shadows—as it asks how identity is made, how it can be transformed, and how we might bring our secrets into the light of day.