The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
James McBride sets his novel in Chicken Hill, the run-down neighborhood where the Jewish and African American families of Pottstown, Pennsylvania live side by side. When the state tries to institutionalize a deaf orphan boy, the community closes ranks to protect him, and a long-buried secret at the bottom of a well ties their fates together. Moving between the 1920s and 30s with McBride's trademark warmth and humor, the story becomes a portrait of how ordinary, overlooked people look after one another.
Themes & atmosphere
Also by James McBride
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What you might want to know about The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In a poor, tight-knit hill neighborhood of 1920s and 30s Pennsylvania, Black and Jewish residents bind together to hide a boy the state wants to take away.
Yes. James McBride also wrote The Good Lord Bird, which won the 2013 National Book Award, and the bestseller Deacon King Kong.
The novel is set in the fictional Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, primarily in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was written by James McBride, published in 2023 by Riverhead Books.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is 400 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.