Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction From Kiese Laymon author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy comes a funny astute searching (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity authorship violence religion and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi. Written in a voice thats alternately humorous lacerating and wise Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first its 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest fourteen-year-old Citoyen City Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day hes sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared. Before leaving City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the books main characters is also named City Coldson--but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City along with his friend and love interest Shalaya Crump discovers a way to travel into the future and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964 to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan. Citys two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmothers house where he discovers the key to Baizes disappearance. Brilliantly skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism (Publishers Weekly) this dreamlike smart funny and sharp (Jesmyn Ward) novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do while living under the shadow of a history that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves (The Wall Street Journal).
