The Mothers

书籍简介：Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, Brit Bennett’s
mesmerizing first novel is an emotionally perceptive story about
community, love, and ambition. It begins with a secret.

“All good
secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment
to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness
of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before
its season.”

It is the last season of high school life for Nadia
Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty.
Mourning her own mother’s recent suicide, she takes up with the local
pastor’s son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose
injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young;
it’s not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen
romance—and the subsequent cover-up—will have an impact that goes far
beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including
Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon,
Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt
to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love
triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant,
nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities
of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.

In entrancing,
lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a “what if” can be more powerful
than an experience itself. If, as time passes, we must always live in
servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, to the communities
that have parented us, and to the decisions we make that shape our lives
forever.