Strivers

A sly, thrilling novel of a murder that rocks Manhattan’s Black elite at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, making them question who they are, what they want, and where the bodies are buried—from the award-winning author of Conjure Women Seventy-seven-year-old Nadine Singleton isn’t going to give her grand-niece’s documentary film crew what they want. Sweating under camera lights, she’s had it with their questions about the skeletons hidden in every closet of the once-magnificent Mulberry Estate in Harlem—until a construction man finds a literal one, bones bleached with age, in the basement wall. It’s 1926 and when the sun goes down, 131st Street comes alive at Singleton’s, an underground speakeasy run by a young Nadine. Though she was once primly behaved, as one of Manhattan’s few Black debutantes, Nadine is now, to her mother’s great dismay, a bootlegging hedonist in men’s clothes, and the life of the clandestine party scene—but it all comes crashing down when her lover’s body turns up dead on the club’s doorstep.