There There

National Bestseller

One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year

One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Dallas Morning News, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe
 
Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize
Winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Winner of an American Book Award
 
Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

The sensational, bestselling debut that has taken the literary world by storm: Tommy Orange’s first novel, which follows twelve characters traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen.

There There is a relentlessly paced multigenerational story about violence and recovery, memory and identity, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle’s memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice and heroism and unspeakable loss. Tommy Orange writes of the plight of the urban Native American—the Native American in the city—in a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. An unforgettable debut, destined to become required reading in schools and universities across the country.