The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• “Dominic Hoffman fully inhabits the characters in McBride’s fresh, vital, beautifully written historical novel, resulting in a deeply immersive listening experience…Hoffman varies his accent and intonation and delivers many different languages for the large cast of characters…with his mesmerizing performance…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”

  — AudioFile

• “A story of community, care, and the lengths to which we’ll go for justice, McBride’s tale is a wondrous ode to the strength of humanity in a small town.”

  — Time

• “[A] vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.”

  — Washington Post

• “A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel…Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “Reading McBride just feels good—we are comforted and entertained, and braced for the hard lessons he also delivers.”

  — The Atlantic

• “I keep thinking every time I read one of his books, ‘That’s his best book.’ No. THIS is his best book.

  — Ann Patchett

• This is one of those novels that becomes a part of you. It’s a great book. Every character is rich; every detail is rich. I can’t recommend this one highly enough. He’s a great author and I think this is his best work.

  — Harlan Coben

• He writes about deep American wounds with love, rage, and a sense of wit that flies like a falcon in large leaping circles, riding the invisible winds of history.

  — Ethan Hawke

• With this story, McBride brilliantly captures a rapidly changing country, as seen through the eyes of the recently arrived and the formerly enslaved . . . And through this evocation, McBride offers us a thorough reminder: Against seemingly impossible odds, even in the midst of humanity’s most wicked designs, love, community and action can save us.

  — The New York Times Book Review

• The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of the best novels I’ve read this year. It pulls off the singular magic trick of being simultaneously flattening and uplifting.

  — NPR

• [A] tour de force . . . [a] mesmerizing, moving, almost magical tale . . . [McBride] writes sentences and paragraphs that swing like jazz melodies.

  — The Associated Press

• Sharp and nimble and warm as a wool hat, James McBride’s prose seems to transcend all earthly concerns, allowing him to write with compassion, humor and authority.

  — The Philadelphia Inquirer

• A story of community, care, and the lengths to which we'll go for justice, McBride's tale is a wondrous ode to the strength of humanity in a small town.

  — Time Magazine

• Enchanting . . . [a] rich, carefully drawn portrait of a Depression-era community of African Americans and Jewish immigrants as they live, love, fight, and, of course, work.

  — The Boston Globe

• McBride . . . would never advance any of his books as candidates for the Great American Novel. . . . I’d like to make a case, though, for Deacon King Kong and, now, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store as better contenders for the 21st-century GAN than many other, more vaunted specimens. . . . In the words of Walt Whitman (an American writer McBride often brings to mind), they contain multitudes.

  — Slate