A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK | NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MIAMI HERALD AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF
THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • NPR • Men’s Journal • The Denver Post • Slate • The Kansas City Star • Time Out
New York | From the author of the critically beloved Pym (“Imagine Kurt Vonnegut having a with Ralph Ellison and
Jules Verne.”—Vanity Fair) comes a ruthlessly comic and moving tale of a man discovering a lost daughter, confronting an
elusive ghost, and stumbling onto the possibility of utopia.
“In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my her’s house.”
Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart;
his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American her has died, bequeathing to Warren his last
possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home,
Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next
day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the
mingled features of his white her and his black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and she’s been
raised to think she’s white.
Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he’s never known, in a
haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in
with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers.
A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and whites, hers and daughters, the living and the
dead, Loving Day celebrates the wonders of sites bound in love.
Praise for Loving Day
“Incisive . . . razor-sharp . . . that rare mélange: cerebral comedy with pathos. The vitality of our narrator deserves
much of the credit for that. He has the neurotic bawdiness of Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy; the keen, caustic eye of
Bob Jones in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go; the existential in of Ellison’s Invisible Man.”—The New York
Times Book Review
“Exceptional . . . To say that Loving Day is a book about race is like saying Moby-Dick is a book about whales. . . .
[Mat Johnson’s] unrelenting examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in between is handled with ruthless
candor and riotous humor. . . . Even when the novel’s family strife and racial politics are at peak intensity, Johnson’s
comic timing is impeccable.”—Los Angeles Times
“Johnson, at his best, is a powerful comic observer [and] a gifted writer, always worth reading on the topics of race
and privilege.’”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Hilarious and touching new novel about family, identity and what it means to truly love other people . . . The
disasters make us who we are, and the results can sometimes be amazing—as amazing as this beautiful, triumphant miracle
of a book.”—NPR
“Giddy, biting . . . ferocious . . . Grand metaphors, unsparing social commentary, sharp characters, and sharper humor
help propel the book. . . . A welcome effort from a major talent.”—The Boston Globe
From the Hardcover edition.