The Unsettled

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia in 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. Estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, and their home in Bonaparte, Alabama, Ava is determined to give her son
the chance of a better life.

But when Toussaint’s father, Cass, reappears, Ava is swept off course by his charisma and his bold vision for racial justice. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass and the radical group he has created, Toussaint begins to sense the danger and threat of violence simmering all around him. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, but can he find his way there?

The Unsettled is an explosive and vital story of belonging, legacy and survival from one of America’s most talented storytellers.


‘[A] powerful book’ Marilynne Robinson
‘A book to be read and re-read’ Jesmyn Ward
‘Poetic and fierce’ Yiyun Li

©2024 Ayana Mathis (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • Deep, rich and huge spirited

    Paul Harding

  • Shelter without the grace of welcome is exposure to the worst coldness of the world. Loyalty and the offer of comfort satisfy needs we feel in our bones. In The Unsettled, Ayana Mathis brings these extremes of experience intensely to life. This is a fine, powerful book

    Marilynne Robinson

  • Ayana Mathis is one of the most brilliant writers working in today’s America. A tour de force, The Unsettled is a poetic and fierce study of the conflicts between circumstances and personalities, between dreams and survivals, between the indifference of the world at large and the passions of individuals

    Yiyun Li

  • The Unsettled crosses generations and landscapes, digs in the Southern soil and walks mean Northern city streets. Expansive and explosive, this beauty of a novel showcases Ayana Mathis’s grace on the page, as writer, as storyteller. A book to be read and re-read

    Jesmyn Ward

  • Poignant, heartbreaking . . . Mathis skillfully and subtly drops allusions to historical events, sending the reader on a kind of intellectual treasure hunt

    The New York Times Book Review

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