Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. A contemporary classic, this “astonishing literary debut” (Margaret Atwood, bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale) “places Native American voices front and center before readers’ eyes” (NPR/ Fresh Air).Īmong them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BESTSELLER Alice Ahn, Water Street Bookstore, Exeter, NH Orange has brought us a book that really is the cream of the crop-of all the crops.” Orange starts the book by introducing characters who are planning to rob a powwow, and as you begin to enjoy them-start to imagine a happy ending, where parents are found and siblings meet at the powwow, somewhere they can feel like a community-the dread of the robbery builds constantly in the background until it explodes. “This is the kind of book that makes you gasp for air because it has gripped you in that spot between your heart and your neck and won’t let go. Heather Weldon, Changing Hands, Tempe, AZ Summer 2019 Reading Group Indie Next List

I think this may be the best book I’ve ever read.” There There has claimed a permanent spot in my heart despite having broken it, or maybe because it did.

He also writes with incredible heart and humor, infusing his characters with a tangible humanity and moments of joy even as they are headed toward tragedy. Tommy Orange writes with a palpable anger and pain, telling the history of a cultural trauma handed down through generations in the blood and bones and stories of individual lives. It is a work of fiction, but every word of it feels true. “ There There is the kind of book that grabs you from the start and doesn’t let go, even after you’ve turned the last page.

There there book cover