Mother Country (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781644450871)

Winner of the 2022 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence
Shortlisted for the 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction
Finalist for the 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award

A transnational feminist novel about human trafficking and motherhood from an award-winning author.

Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life.

In rendering Souria's separation from her family across vast stretches of desert and Shannon's alienation from her mother under the same roof, Jacinda Townsend brilliantly stages cycles of intergenerational trauma and healing. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both, these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning. Mother Country is a bone-deep and unsparing portrayal of the ethical and emotional claims we make upon one another in the name of survival, in the name of love.

Author: Jacinda Townsend
ISBN-10: 1644450879
ISBN-13: 9781644450871
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Language: English
Published: 05/03/2022
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 12/01/2021 pg. 7
Library Journal 04/01/2022 pg. 81
Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2022
Booklist 04/15/2022 pg. 17
Publishers Weekly 05/02/2022