McBride (The Good Lord Bird) delivers a sharply compassionate shaggy dog tale of a heavy drinking Baptist deacon who shoots a drug dealer and becomes a 'walking dead man.' In the autumn of 1969, handyman and occasional baseball coach Deacon Cuffy Lambkin, known to his friends as 'Sportcoat' because of his colorful wardrobe or as 'Deacon King Kong' on account of his equal affection for a moonshine with that name, inexplicably shoots off the ear of Deems Clemens, Sportcoat's former baseball prot g. Told with insight and wit, Deacon King Kong demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.īringing to these pages both his masterly storytelling skills and his abiding faith in humanity, James McBride has written a novel every bit as involving as The Good Lord Bird and as emotionally honest as The Color of Water.

In Deacon King Kong, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.Īs the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters-caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York-overlap in unexpected ways. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride’s funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird. 38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range. 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. Named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly and TIME Magazineįrom the author of the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird and the bestselling modern classic The Color of Water, comes one of the most celebrated novels of the year. One of Barack Obama's 'Favorite Books of the Year'

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction

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