A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - "[Mat Johnson's] unrelenting
examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in between is handled
with ruthless candor and riotous humor."--Los Angeles Times
"Razor-sharp . . . Loving Day is that rare mélange: cerebral comedy
with pathos."--The New York Times Book Review
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The New York Times - San Francisco Chronicle - NPR - Men's
Journal - The Miami Herald - The Denver Post - Slate - The
Kansas City Star - San Antonio Express-News - Time Out New York
Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His
marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in
Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing
to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the
heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren
spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to
confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a
different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics
convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his
black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and she's
been raised to think she's white.
Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with
a reluctant daughter he's never known, in a haunted house with a history
he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle
with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot
on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers.
A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and
whites, fathers and daughters, the living and the dead, Loving Day
celebrates the wonders of opposites bound in love.
Praise for Loving Day
"Incisive . . . razor-sharp . . . that rare mélange: cerebral comedy
with pathos. The vitality of our narrator deserves much of the credit
for that. He has the neurotic bawdiness of Philip Roth's Alexander
Portnoy; the keen, caustic eye of Bob Jones in Chester Himes's If He
Hollers Let Him Go; the existential insight of Ellison's Invisible
Man."--The New York Times Book Review
"Exceptional . . . To say that Loving Day is a book about race is like
saying Moby-Dick is a book about whales. . . . [Mat Johnson's]
unrelenting examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in
between is handled with ruthless candor and riotous humor. . . . Even
when the novel's family strife and racial politics are at peak
intensity, Johnson's comic timing is impeccable."--Los Angeles
Times
"Johnson, at his best, is a powerful comic observer [and] a gifted
writer, always worth reading on the topics of race and
privilege.'"--Dwight Garner, The New York Times
