Winner of the Library of Virginia Fiction Award
Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
Winner of the Weatherford Award for fiction
Winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize
One of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction books of the year
National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize Finalist
Kirkus Prize Fiction Finalist
LA BOOK PRIZE finalist for debut fiction
The Story Prize long-list finalist
Pen/Faulkner Award long-list finalist
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction
An NPR Books We Love of 2021 selection
BUY THE BOOK
“Simply put, a masterly feat.”
—Bridgette M. Davis, New York Times
“A badass debut by any measure—nimble, knowing, and electrifying.”
—Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys
“Absolutely unforgettable…Johnson's prose soars to new heights”
—Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Hunger and Ayiti
"Chilling, thought-provoking and expertly crafted… Johnson’s [stories] broke my heart as well as my brain."
—Charles Yu, National Book Award-winning author of Interior Chinatown
‘‘…a magnificent debut that holds so much in its gaze―great love and great oppression, tremendous individual courage and systemic racism, futures of joyful justice and futures of extremism. This breathtaking, artful book is a gift."
―Megha Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning
"…a gorgeous, devastating collection of stories spotlighting the ways a life, a country, and a planet can tend toward disaster but still be worth fighting for."
―Danielle Evans, award-winning author of The Office of Historical Corrections
“sustained by a cast of characters so unique, sincere, and determined that you will not only root for them, but see your own humanity reflected back.”
―Mateo Askaripour, New York Times Bestselling author of Black Buck
“…necessary and brimming with both heart and imagination, Johnson’s My Monticello is a beautiful debut work of art.”
―Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black
“Pitch-perfect...riveting storytelling. This incandescent work speaks not just to the moment, but to history.”
―Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review
“My Monticello” is, quite simply, an extraordinary debut from a gifted writer with an unflinching view of history and what may come of it.”
―Anissa Gray, The Washington Post
“I want to sell this one more than I want to sell my own book…This is a master storyteller’s arrival.”
―Isaac Fitzgerald, The Today Show
“A sharp debut from a writer with wit and confidence.”
―Kirkus, Starred Review
“A compilation of vivid, complex stories, at times reminiscent of works by Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead”
―Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“This collection harmoniously weds the ugly with the beautiful, the terrifying and the brave, the disappointing and the hopeful, and makes for a brilliant debut”
―Ms. Magazine
“This fiction collection is an astonishing display of craftsmanship and heart-tugging narratives. Johnson is a brilliant storyteller who gracefully reflects a clear mirror on a troubled America.”
–Booklist, Starred Review
A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America.
Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation.
In “Control Negro,” hailed by Roxane Gay as “one hell of story,” a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by clinically observing his own son from birth in order to “painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.” Johnson’s characters all seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of Alexandria, finding himself adrift; a young mixed-race woman who adopts a new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her family; or a single mother who seeks salvation through “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse.”
United by these characters’ relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable book that bears witness to this country’s legacies and announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American fiction.
