The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

The great scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called ´Double Consciousness,´ a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois´s words all too well. Ailey grows up in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta. From an early age, she fights a battle for belonging made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women - her mother, her sister and a maternal line reaching back two centuries - that urge her to succeed in their stead. Ailey embarks on a journey through her family´s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors - Indigenous, Black, and white - in the deep South. In doing so she must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story - and the song - of America itself. With all the dazzling force of Yaa Gyasi´s Homegoing and Jesmyn Ward´s Sing, Unburied, Sing, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is set to be one of the most talked about books of the year...