That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. Isaiah was Samuel’s and Samuel was Isaiah’s. The Prophets is a courageous book, unflinching in its examination of the most painful and most tender aspects of life and history. In this awe-inspiring debut, Robert Jones, Jr.,’s inventiveness with form and language is matched by his profound emotional acuity. Swirling around this powerful love story is a kaleidoscopic array of characters we enter the worlds and minds of the enslaved, the enslavers, the female kings and male wives in Kosongo territory in the ancestral homeland. Their passion for each other, the dignity they bestow on each other, the small world they create and protect together, forms the core of the book. But there is, at the center of The Prophets, amid the grief and horror, a refuge: the relationship between Isaiah and Samuel, two young men enslaved on the Mississippi plantation known as Empty. This is a devastating book, an evocation of and reckoning with the deep stain of slavery. In The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr., nimbly navigates this delicate interplay between the epic and the microscopic, between historical crises and interpersonal ones. A surprising gesture, a subtle moment of duplicity, an unlikely flash of kindness, conjured so vividly that it haunts me long after I finish reading.
Books that explore the deepest questions about life and love and death and history and identity-and that animate these questions by way of infinitesimal human interactions.
I crave books that are simultaneously attentive to the big things and the little things.
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