Ask a Bookseller: 'The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store'

Shane Grebel of Watermark Books & Café in Wichita, Kan., says his favorite book of the year is the novel “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride.

With the successes of his previous books, including National Book Award winner “The Good Lord Bird,” “The Color of Water,” and “Deacon King Kong,” it's no surprise that McBride's newest novel debuted in August as an instant New York Times Bestseller. McBride says the book is worth the hype.

The novel opens in 1972 with a body discovered at the bottom of a well. Who is it, and how did it get there? The answers to these well-kept town secrets take us back to the 1920s. There in the outskirts of Pottstown, Penn., in a neighborhood called Chicken Hill, African American and recent Jewish immigrant communities live and work together. E

veryone in the neighborhood goes to the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, whose owner, Chona, has a soft spot for children. In particular, she's determined to protect a deaf boy named Dodo.

The state wants to see Dodo in an institution. Dodo's Black and Jewish neighbors must work together to try to rescue him from the sanitorium. Meanwhile, the questions raised by the body in the well remain.

“At the end of the day,” says Grebel, the author's “underlying belief in the good of humanity and his incredible way that he has of humanizing these difficult issues of race and class and gender and disability and religion come just shining through this lyrical prose that James is just a master of delivering.”