![]() ![]() The Dubois of the title, meanwhile, refers to the writings of the 20th-century novelist who charted the black experience in America. A second narrative focuses on the modern day, and the family’s latest descendant, Ailey Pearl Garfield, born in Georgia in 1973, whose knowledge of her complicated family tree is kept alive both through her ageing relatives and by becoming a historian. It aims to tell no less than the story of America itself, spanning 200 years, and charting black oppression through many generations of the same family. It is heavy, in every sense, and its very existence rather suggests that, as a debut novelist, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is either ostentatiously gifted, dazzlingly ambitious – or quite possibly both. Dubois, by a 54-year-old US poet it’s probably safe to say few people in the UK have heard of, clocks in at almost 800 pages. Even avid readers may balk before they pick up a doorstop, those epics – invariably American – whose multiple narratives spool out and dare to test the attention span in a world already held hostage by diversion. We tend to approach books the size of bricks with a certain caution. ![]()
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