Oprah Starts New Bookclub

Oprah Winfrey’s wildly successful book club ended shortly before she left television. It was however, so popular that the talk show icon has decided to revive it. Known as Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, her selection has already achieved bestseller gold.

Her first pick for the revived book club was just announced. It it the debut novel of author Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.  The book chronicles the “Great Migration” of 1910-1930 of black Americans leaving the South and heading north in search of jobs and a better life.

From the Barnes & Noble Page:

A debut of extraordinary distinction: Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family.

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented.  Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave.  She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a nation.

Beautiful and devastating, Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is wondrous from first to last—glorious, harrowing, unexpectedly uplifting, and blazing with life. An emotionally transfixing novel, a searing portrait of striving in the face of insurmountable adversity, an indelible encounter with the resilience of the human spirit and the driving force of the American dream.