Big girl

£9.99

Malaya Clondon hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings in the church’s stuffy basement community centre. A quietly inquisitive eight-year-old struggling to suppress her insatiable longing, she would much rather paint alone in her bedroom, or sneak out with her father for a sampling of Harlem’s forbidden street foods. For Malaya, the pressures of going to an exclusive, predominantly white prep school are compounded by the high expectations passed down over generations from her sharp-tongued grandmother and her mother, Nyela, a professor struggling to earn tenure at a prestigious university. But their relentless prescriptions – fad diets, African dance classes, endless doctors’ appointments – don’t work on Malaya. As Malaya comes of age in a rapidly gentrifying 1990s Harlem, she strains to fit within society’s suffocating confines that hold no room for her body.

In stock

Description

A BBC RADIO 2 BOOKCLUB PICK
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CENTRE FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE, THE GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE AND THE LAMBDA AWARD

*’Absolutely incredible. Beautiful, powerful writing. These pages will stay with me forever’ CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS, author of QUEENIE

*’A gift as big, beautiful and complicated as living itself’ Jacqueline Woodson, author of RED AT THE BONE
*’Hilariously funny and quietly devastating’ Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of PATSY and HERE COMES THE SUN
*’There are three books on earth that I would give anything to be able to write and reread until the suns burns us up. Big Girl is one of those books’ Kiese Laymon, author of HEAVY

Growing up in rapidly gentrifying 90s Harlem, Malaya struggles to fit into a world that makes no room for her. She’s funny, creative and smart, but all people see – even those who love her – is her size. At eight, she is forced to go to Weight Watchers; at twelve, her parents fear she’ll be taken from them; by sixteen, a gastric bypass is discussed.

But tensions at home are mounting as rapidly as Malaya’s weight, and soon a family tragedy forces her to finally face the source of her hunger on her own terms…

An extraordinary debut novel shot through with remarkable nuance and tenderness, Big Girl is the unforgettable portrait of a queer Black girl as she learns to take up space in the world.

Additional information

Dimensions 19.8 × 12.6 × 2.2 cm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

272

Language

English

Edition

1st paperback ed

Dewey

813.6 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K

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