What we lose

A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction One of the most talked-about debuts of 2017, a stunning novel about a young African American woman's coming-of-age-a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, family, and country Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother's childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor-someone, or something, to love. We watch Thandi's life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood. Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live after loss. An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman's understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, What We Lose heralds the arrival of a virtuosic, arresting new voice in fiction.