Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher

SAINT MONKEY

Jacinda Townsend

A stunning debut novel of two girls raised in hardship, separated by fortune, and reunited through tragedy.

Fourteen-year-old Audrey Martin, with her Poindexter glasses and her head humming the 3/4 meter of gospel music, knows she’ll never get out of Kentucky—but when her fingers touch the piano keys, the whole church trembles. Her best friend, Caroline, daydreams about Hollywood stardom, but both girls feel destined to languish in a slow-moving stopover town in Montgomery County. That is, until chance intervenes and a booking agent offers Audrey a ticket to join the booming jazz scene in Harlem—an offer she can’t resist, not even for Caroline. And in New York City the music never stops. Audrey flirts with love and takes the stage at the Apollo, with its fast-dancing crowds and blinding lights. But fortunes can turn fast in the city—young talent means tough competition, and for Audrey failure is always one step away. Meanwhile, Caroline sinks into the quiet anguish of a Black woman in a backwards country, where her ambitions and desires only slip further out of reach. Jacinda Townsend’s remarkable first novel is a coming-of-age story made at once gripping and poignant by the wild energy of the Jazz Era and the stark realities of segregation. Marrying musical prose with lyric vernacular, Saint Monkey delivers a stirring portrait of American storytelling and marks the appearance of an auspicious new voice in literary fiction. Jacinda Townsend studied at Harvard University and Duke University Law School before receiving her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana, and teaches creative writing at Indiana University. Saint Monkey is her first novel.

Available products
Book Published 2014-02-14 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

With the backdrop of segregation and its humiliations and acts of violence, the story examines an intense friendship marred by betrayals, real and perceived. What’s impressive about this first novel—apart from the startling music of its language—is Ms. Townsend’s willingness to steep her characters in heartache. Read more...

Reading SAINT MONKEY is as painful and irresistible as the friendship that forms this novel’s core…Surely a book to curl up with. Read more...

Jacinda Townsend’s debut novel, SAINT MONKEY, is the winner of the 2015 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for “works of literary fiction that significantly advance the historical imagination".

The freedom and energy of Harlem sing through Audrey…Townsend captures both the girls’ relationship and the desperation of the small, black community in Appalachia.

This is a breathtakingly insightful, suspenseful, and gorgeously realized novel of cruelty and sorrow, anger and forgiveness, improvisation and survival, and the transcendent beauty of nature and art.

Townsend skillfully introduces us to a world most of us know little about…[and] realistically navigates her characters through the tumultuous times of the civil rights era…Townsend’s use of regional dialogue is delightful, and she is strongest when she is creating settings that are at once historically vibrant and visually concrete. Read more...

A novel of immense depth and tenderness. Townsend’s prose recalls the music of Toni Morrison, and Saint Monkey takes us on a soulful and deeply satisfying journey into the heart of Appalachia, and beyond.

A compelling debut…Townsend’s writing is full of fresh turns of phrase and keen insights.

Saint Monkey is an absolute marvel of a book. Jacinda Townsend is dazzling as she transports the reader to a different time and place—the 1950s, rural Kentucky, and Harlem at the height of the jazz era. Two young girls, Audrey and Caroline, fight for a place in the world and, though their paths at times diverge, their journeys and this writer will utterly captivate you.