The Occidental Book of the Dead: A Novel

Summary

From the PEN/Faulkner finalist and National Book Award longlisted author of Welcome to Braggsville, comes this long-awaited, visionary new novel centered on a Black cop in an Atlanta precinct, whose façade of white alliance begins to crumble after a highly publicized murder.

George Washington Jonson is determined to forge a new life. After growing up in one of Atlanta’s poorest housing projects, he enlists in the U.S. Army and finds some relief serving abroad. When events lead him back home, he joins the police force. It’s 1992, and Jonson is patrolling the streets he grew up on alongside his new partner, a shady legacy cop and self-described “redneck” who takes Jonson under his wing.

After a decade on the job, Jonson has fashioned a new life for himself in an affluent suburb with his white wife and stepson, though he’s still policing his old neighborhood, and now tasked with training hot-headed rookie recruits. One night on patrol a split-second confrontation with a white teenager takes a violent turn. That single gunshot sets into motion a series of escalating lies—all threatening to be exposed as investment in the case mounts to a fever pitch.

When the white-washed veneer of Jonson’s life begins to crack, the story splits, presenting two contrasting versions of the American experience as he’s forced to confront the history that shaped him and the compromises required of a good man in a broken system.

Employing a bold, inventive structure and spanning two fraught decades, vividly evoking the complexities of the South, and written with the same virtuosic dissonance and insight as his previously acclaimed novels, The Occidental Book of the Dead is a propulsive, pyrotechnic exploration of systems of corruption and conspiracy—and an epic, unflinching portrait of a nation divided.