Virago is proud to publish two beautiful new editions of Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills and Bailey’s Cafe, both with brilliant new introductions by Irenosen Okojie. It’s the perfect moment to discover – or return to – one of the great American storytellers of the late twentieth century.

A National Book Award winner whose body of work spans six novels, Naylor wrote with extraordinary range and ambition. Her fiction moves fluidly between social realism and the supernatural, between Brooklyn brownstones and mythic islands, between Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. What unites it is her gift for telling the stories of Black American lives with what Tayari Jones has called ‘timeless wisdom, bottomless empathy, and limitless language’.

We’ve put together a guide to Naylor’s novels to help you decide where to begin.

Linden Hills (1985)

In the wealthy Black American neighbourhood of Linden Hills, an address is a symbol that you’ve made it – and a home on prestigious Tupelo Drive is the ultimate prize. But as two young poets from the wrong side of town take on odd jobs in the neighbourhood, their warmth and disbelief expose the hypocrisy of life on the ‘right’ side of the tracks. A searing reimagining of Dante’s Inferno, Linden Hills lays bare the price of success and the lost souls who pay it. Beguiling, ambitious and unsparing, it remains one of Naylor’s most powerful achievements.

 

Bailey’s Cafe (1992)

On a quiet backstreet in postwar Brooklyn, there’s a little place that draws people from all over – not for the food, and definitely not for the coffee. An in-between place that’s only there when you need it, Bailey’s Cafe is a crossroads where patrons stay for a while before making a choice: move on or check out. Among them: Sadie, the ladylike alcoholic with a mania for cleanliness; Sweet Esther, who takes payment only in white roses; and Mariam, the Ethiopian child who may be the bearer of a miracle. A virtuoso fusion of survival, suffering and grace, Bailey’s Cafe is a blues tapestry of America at its most heartbreaking and most human.

 

The Women of Brewster Place (1982)

Naylor’s debut announced a major new literary voice and won the 1983 National Book Award for First Novel. Set on a dead-end street walled off from the rest of the city, The Women of Brewster Place tells the interconnected stories of seven women – mothers, daughters, lovers and friends – whose lives unfold against a backdrop of poverty, prejudice and resilience. Tender, furious and quietly luminous, it remains the natural starting point for anyone new to Naylor’s work, and was famously adapted into a television miniseries starring (and produced by) Oprah Winfrey.

 

Mama Day (1988)

On Willow Springs, a small island off the coast of Georgia, the matriarch Mama Day holds court over a place where folklore, conjure and family history shape every life. When her great-niece Cocoa returns home from New York with her new husband George, the island’s older magic begins to gather around them. Drawing on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the rich traditions of Black Southern storytelling, Mama Day is widely regarded as Naylor’s masterpiece – a novel of love, inheritance and the thinness of the veil between worlds.

 

The Men of Brewster Place (1998)

Sixteen years after her debut, Naylor returned to the dead-end street that started it all – this time turning her attention to the men behind the women. Fathers, sons, husbands and brothers step forward to tell their own tragic, funny and heroic stories, deepening the world of Brewster Place and reframing what came before. A companion piece rather than a sequel, it’s a generous and complicating final visit to one of contemporary fiction’s most enduring fictional communities.

 

1996 (2005)

Naylor’s final novel is her most unusual: a fictionalised memoir in which a writer named Gloria Naylor finds herself the target of a covert government surveillance operation. Drawing on her own beliefs about being watched and harassed, the book blurs the line between autobiography and fiction to ask urgent questions about civil liberties, paranoia and the cost of speaking out. A bold and unsettling late work from a writer who never stopped reckoning with the world around her.

 

With Linden Hills and Bailey’s Cafe arriving in beautiful new editions, there’s never been a better time to discover – or rediscover – one of the great American storytellers.