The Peach Seed
A Debut Novel by Anita Gail Jones | Henry Holt & Company (August, 2023)
“Take this to keep the monkey off your back—‘cause being a man is more than a notion.”
Rite of passage catchphrase from The Peach Seed
“A sweeping multigenerational novel showing the origins of one south Georgia family’s tradition of giving carved peach seed monkeys to all male descendants…
And how its modern-day sons and daughters navigate the legacies of America’s Civil Rights Movement and the far-reaching impacts of the 1800 slave trade from northern Senegal to Charleston, South Carolina.“
From Publishers Weekly:
“Jones debuts with a layered saga of a Southern Black family that weaves stories of the slave trade and the 1960s civil rights movement…[She] manages to tie together the themes of ancestral heritage and the persistent power of love.”
An Excerpt
Anita Gail Jones narrates the audiobook for The Peach Seed.
LISTEN to this excerpt (4:50 min), or READ/DOWNLOAD the excerpt below.
It’s March, 2012 in Albany, Georgia, a southern city running on country fuel.
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Read an Excerpt from The Peach Seed – Chapter 1
About the Story
As readers will discover in The Peach Seed, the catchphrase at the top of this page has ushered boys into manhood for generations in the family of fictional widower Fletcher Dukes, a seventy-year-old black man living in southwest Georgia. In each rite-of-passage, those words accompany a monkey, intricately carved from a peach seed. Through many lines—from Africa’s lost trails, to antebellum to modern-day—much changes. And too much remains the same.
Fletcher is distracted from a family feud when blues singer Altovise Benson—the plucky lost love of his life—unexpectedly retires home after fifty-two years. As teens, they worked in the (factual) Albany Civil Rights Movement until separated by horrific events. He remained local; she migrated north.
The story is set in Albany, Georgia and surrounds; Dougherty County, a region baptized in natural beauty, a place not unlike much of America—with a history that runs the gamut, and many untold stories.
A bounty of voices convey intricacies of place and people, and at it’s core, this southern American tale shows two people battling the consequences of history’s sweep and personal choice. Much is laid bare when lives interconnect across miles and eras through the Dukes family talisman ~ a monkey delicately carved from a peach seed.
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