A woman learns the astonishing truth of her family’s ties to a vanished American Kingdom in this riveting new novel from the New York Times bestselling, NAACP Image Award-winning author of Take My Hand. If you are a fan of Brit Bennett and Yaa Gyasi, you do not want to miss Books Over Drinks with Dolen Perkins-Valdez!
REVIEWS:
“What a story! Happy Land is an exhilarating tale of perseverance, identity, and love that echoes across generations. This story of formerly enslaved families in the Blue Ridge Mountains who built a community against all odds will stay with me for a long time.”
—Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake
“Picture a time when a kingdom existed inside the confines of the Carolinas — a time when freedpeople were royalty. What if that was your history, instead of the trauma of enslavement and generational poverty? As Dolen Perkins-Valdez says in this astonishing, historical-based novel — a family tree isn’t just something you draw on paper. It’s only when you’re rooted in the soil that your family once inhabited that your imagination can brush the sky.”
—Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author of By Any Other Name
“No one writes the historical novel quite like Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and with Happy Land, she’s at her brilliant best, opening History’s treasure-filled chest—and then, bringing that history to life. Here is the Ancestor who cried, laughed, and hoped before any of us were born. Here is the vulnerable earth that tenders its secrets. In Happy Land, Perkins-Valdez offers the knowledge that we surely need: to move forward, we must understand what came before. Her existing fans will be so satisfied—and her new readers will be captivated.”
—Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, New York Times bestselling author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author of Wench (2010), Balm (2015), and most recently Take My Hand (2022) which was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Newsweek, San Francisco Chronicle, Essence, NBC News, and elsewhere. Amazon named Take My Hand one of the Top 20 Books of 2022. The novel was awarded a 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, and Fiction Award from Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It has been longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. A three-time nominee for a United States Artists Fellowship, Dolen is widely considered a pre-eminent chronicler of American historical life. Her forthcoming novel Happy Land will be published in April 2025. She is Associate Professor in the MFA Program at American University in Washington, DC.
Never been to a Books Over Drinks? Your ticket includes entry to the event, a copy of the book, and a signature cocktail or mocktail.