"Told in searingly beautiful style, this exceptional debut blazes with truths about social, sexual and racial injustices through the agonising experiences of a Black American teenager."
Sparked by a real-life police abuse scandal in Oakland, California, Leila Mottley’s intensely affecting Nightcrawling debut, written when she was just seventeen, burns with brutal truths and a raw beauty that lays bare an astounding spirit of love and survival.
Though not quite 18, Kiara has long had to play an adult role in life. Her former Black Panther father is dead, as is her little sister. Her mama is in a halfway house “prison without the bars”, while her older brother clings to a dream of making it in rap music. So, it’s fallen to Kiara to take responsibility for paying rent and putting food on the table.
What’s more, she also cares for Trevor, a ten-year-old child whose mother keeps going AWOL. Trapped in poverty, and unable to get a job, Kiara is forced to nightcrawl. “It’s just a body,” she tells herself.
After being picked up by a couple of cops, Kiara is forced to have sex with them and their colleagues. Though she had no choice, she wishes she’d never given them her number - “they only want me to show themselves they can have me…These are the men who load their guns and point them with a grin, and find a girl in an alley and decide she is theirs”. Later, when one of the cops is found dead, Kiara finds herself at the heart of an investigation into police corruption and sexual exploitation, but being named as a key witness puts everything and everyone she knows into danger.
As the case exposes the adultification of Black girls and the corrupt core of an unjust system, Kiara keeps on caring for Trevor, keeps on trying to help her brother, keeps on living and loving.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system. This debut of a blazingly original voice "bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole" (Tommy Orange, author of There There).
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
| Recommendations: |
Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prisonBut while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent-which has more than doubled-and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed. One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.Rich with raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.
Nightcrawling features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, General Fiction, Fiction, Debut Books of the Month, Recommendations, Debuts
Paperback, Ebook, Hardback. Not Available.
Nightcrawling was written by Leila Mottley and published by Knopf an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Nightcrawling has 271 pages
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