All Aunt Hagar's Children

Edward P. Jones, the bestselling and prize-winning author of The Known World, returns to the form that first inspired him—the short story. And as with Lost in the City, his stories are filled not with the movers and shakers who some think define a city, in this case, Washington D.C. but with its ordinary citizens, people who in Jones’s masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are newly arrived country folk used to going to bed with the chickens or people with two-hundred-fifty years of education behind them.

“In the Blink of God’s Eye,” Ruth and Aubrey move from Virginia to Washington D.C., where Ruth finds an infant tied to a tree, just the kind of oddity she has come to expect from the city. But she cares for the baby as her own, and as a result causes a strain in her marriage. In “A Rich Man,” a retired Army sergeant moves into a home for senior citizens and finds he’s suddenly very attractive to not just to the older women but also to the young ones. But will the “young stuff”-and their accomplices be his downfall?

With All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Jones’s turns an unflinching eye to people living between the old ways of the South and the sophistication of the city and delivers, once again, a book that has “the affirmative power of all great art in that it brims with beauty and compassion and humor and love—with life.”