"Hebert demonstrates an ambition and clarity of vision that is rare in a first novel. A rich, synthesized imagining of the personal history of a country torn asunder." —Kirkus Reviews
“Epic and self-assured.” —Metro Pulse
“Allegories about the morality of international development projects are rarely as subtle and lyrical as Christopher Hebert's debut novel, The Boiling Season." —Miami Herald
“The Boiling Season is a subtly crafted novel and an auspicious debut.” —Dayton Daily News
"It's remarkable to see an American novel so profoundly steeped in the tradition of the great Haitian writers of the twentieth century. The Boiling Season . . . is a hypnotically fascinating novel.” —Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls' Rising
“A compelling psychological study, a tour-de-force of restrained, unreliable first-person narration, a love letter to a beautiful, forgotten place, and a visceral depiction of Haitian political upheaval—The Boiling Season is all that and more. A truly auspicious debut.” —Michael Knight, author of The Typist and Divining Rod
“The wealthy live behind walls on a protected hillside, literally looking down at the capital's teeming slums below. Political careers are built on money and brutality, and the island's racial divide is the lingering legacy of colonial rule. . . . In The Boiling Season, those who seek to impose order on what they perceive as chaos are as vulnerable to corruption as the system they promised to change.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“All the best political novels ask us how and where we are called to action. At what cost is wealth in the midst of poverty maintained? And who collaborates in its maintenance? The Boiling Season asks all the right questions, and it answers those questions beautifully, with great dramatic force.” —Charles Baxter, author of Gryphon: New and Selected Stories and The Feast of Love
"A humbler, more endearing bunch of rainbow-hued misfits never fumbled their broken-hearted way towards revolution than those we meet in Angels of Detroit–truly a novel of our moment.” —Jaimy Gordon, author of the National Book Award-winning Lord of Misrule
“Set in a city that's either deteriorating beyond hope or rising from the ashes, Angels of Detroit pulls off the magic trick of all great fiction: it makes the world we live in now seem both wondrous and strange.” —Adam Ross, author of Mr. Peanut
“Hebert's Detroit is an eerie and cinematic ghost town.”
—Wall Street Journal
“A rust belt epic by a writer of distinctive vision. More than a dozen years in the making. . . . Worth the wait.”
—Peter Ho Davies, Ploughshares
“A testament to the complexities of Detroit—as well as [to] Hebert's dedication to portraying the city with honesty and integrity. Angels of Detroit is an epic told through a diverse group of characters, all trying to redefine themselves in a struggling city.” —The Detroit Free Press
“So completely did I fall for the misfits and idealists that populate Angels of Detroit that more than once I found myself on Google Maps, seeking signs of their real life counterparts, infusing that beleaguered city with hope. Christopher Hebert's wondrous novel brims and bristles with the rarest of fictional qualities: raw humanity.” —David Goodwillie, author of American Subversive
“Hebert's powerful novel will produce chills. . . . Scrambling for viable options, Hebert's current residents [of Detroit]—activists, planners, takers, opportunists, and optimists still living in a city that looks war-gutted—are undertaking to shake off the shroud of how-did-this-happen and discover renewed vigor. Hebert's tenacious prose . . . drives the narrative and brings characters . . . to visceral life.” —Booklist
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Christopher Hebert
The Death and Life of American Adam: Myth and the Contemporary American Political Novel
Christopher Hebert
Fiction, Race, and History in 1950's Iraq
Martin Griffin
"An openhearted and honest rendering of American masculinity, handled with such dexterity. Shows us all the miles we travel in the hopes that where we end up will make us a different person. An exceptional book by an exceptional author."
—Kevin Wilson, bestselling author of Nothing to See Here and Now Is Not the Time to Panic
"One has to wonder whether Stories of Nation isn’t finally onto something when it makes its central claim: that when it comes to confluences of the political and the literary, we might be shying away more than we would like to admit." — T. Austin Graham, American Literary History
The Author
short reads
CHRISTOPHER HEBERT is the author of the novels Delivery (Regal), Angels of Detroit (Bloomsbury), and The Boiling Season (HarperCollins), and co-editor of Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience (UT Press). He is a former senior editor for the University of Michigan Press and currently lives in Knoxville, TN, where he is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee.
