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Zeal: A Novel Audiobook
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Named a Most Anticipated Book by Washington Post, People, Time
“A beautiful tale.” —Jason Reynolds, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Twenty-four Seconds from Now
The New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing and Caul Baby returns with an epic, multi-generational novel that illuminates the legacy of slavery and the power of romantic love.
Harlem, 2019. Ardelia and Oliver are hosting their engagement party. As the guests get ready to leave, he hands her a love letter on a yellowing, crumbling piece of paper . . .
Natchez, 1865. Discharged from the Union Army as a free man after the war’s end, Harrison returns to Mississippi to reunite with the woman he loves, Tirzah. Upon his arrival at the Freedmen’s Bureau, though, he catches the eye of a woman working there, who’s determined to thwart his efforts to find his beloved. After tragedy strikes, Harrison resigns himself to a life with her.
Meanwhile in Louisiana, the newly free Tirzah is teaching at a freedmen’s school, and discovers an advertisement in the local paper looking for her. Though she knows Harrison must have placed it, and longs to find him, the risks of fleeing are too great, and Tirzah chooses the life of seeming security right in front of her.
Spanning over a hundred and fifty years, Morgan Jerkins’s extraordinary novel intertwines the stories of these star-crossed lovers and their descendants. As Tirzah's family moves across the country during the Great Migration, they challenge authority with devastating consequences, while the legacy of heartbreak and loss continues on in the lives of Harrison's progeny.
When Ardelia meets Oliver, she finds his family’s history is as full of secrets and omissions as her own. Could their connection be a cosmic reconciliation satisfying the unfulfilled desires of their ancestors, or will the weight of the past, present and future tear them apart?
Sweeping, textured, and meticulously researched, Zeal is both a story of how one generation’s choices reverberate through the years and an indelible portrait of an enduring love.
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About Morgan Jerkins
Morgan Jerkins is the author of four books, including the bestseller This Will Be My Undoing, and a senior culture editor at ESPN’s The Undefeated. She is a visiting professor at Columbia University and a Forbes “30 Under 30 leader in media, and her short-form work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Elle, Esquire, and the London Guardian, among many other outlets
About the Narrators
January LaVoy, winner of numerous awards for narration, was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine in 2019. She is an American actress best known for her character Noelle Ortiz on the ABC daytime drama One Life to Live. In addition to working extensively in narration and television, including roles on Law & Order and All My Children, she has worked on and off Broadway as well as in regional theater.
Nicole Small (a.k.a. Shayna Small) is an actress/singer born and raised in Chicago. In the middle of her freshman year of high school she relocated to Baltimore to attend a performing arts school. She holds a BFA in drama at the Juilliard School. Her theater credits include Hurt Village and The Threepenny Opera.