Great Black Hope
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Great Black Hope
Narrated by:
Justice Smith, Rob Franklin
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Justice Smith
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Rob Franklin
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By:
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Rob Franklin
About this listen
An arrest for cocaine possession in the Hamptons on the last day of a sweltering summer leaves Smith, a young Black Queer graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him but his race does not. It is just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, a glamorous member of the Black elite, and he is still reeling from the tabloid spectacle - as well as the lingering question of how well he really knew his closest friend and what happened to her the night she died.
When he flees to his hometown of Atlanta and generations of his family of doctors and college presidents and lawyers - the weight of expectations haunts him. Then Carolyn, the closest friend he has left, goes off the rails, Smith returns to New York only to lose himself in his old life, drawn back into the city's underworld. Will his search for the truth about Elle cost him his freedom and his future?
Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the New York City nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta's Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiralling downward and how to find a way back to hope.©2025 Rob Franklin (P)2025 Simon & Schuster UK
Critic reviews
'It’s thrilling to see any author today aiming for the big stuff all at once: death, race, sex, class, addiction. It’s beyond thrilling—incandescent, even—when a writer like Rob Franklin comes along with the formal virtuosity to carry those lofty conceptual ambitions. Franklin’s prose is eminently readable, frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and full of sentences I want to cut out and glue to my forehead. This book is so smart, so moving, so earned; as soon as I finished, I started reading it again.' (Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!)
'The precision and ecstasy of Rob Franklin's prose had me entranced. Great Black Hope marks the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer.' (Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning)
'What a marvel to discover a voice so authentic, urgent, and undeniable. GREAT BLACK HOPE is a rare thing: a coming-of-age novel that examines the individual as well as the complex systems that shape his life. An intensely intimate yet expansive work of art.' (Tania James, author of Loot)
'Rob Franklin’s prose is rich, mesmerizing, and utterly gorgeous. Through each remarkable sentence, Franklin takes you through a meditation on one Black queer man's struggle with the confinement of his choices under the magnifying glass of wealthy America.' (Leila Mottley, author of Nightcrawling)
'Great Black Hope indeed! Rob Franklin’s brilliant storytelling explores and explodes every fact and fiction of those charged words; likewise, the intricacies and treacheries of privilege. Those categories we parse so confidently — class, race, gender sexuality — are shaped into nuanced individual stories. His prose is elegant and searching, his pace flawless from start to finish.' (Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland)
'The music of Rob Franklin’s writing is so seductive, you won’t even notice the shiv until it’s too late.' (Saeed Jones, author of Alive at the End of the World)
'Great Black Hope is at once a novel of crime—with a gripping pace, propelled by a question that needs answering—and a timeless coming of age story.' (Rumaan Alam, author of Entitlement)
'Rob Franklin’s debut novel, Great Black Hope, is a masterpiece– at once fresh and original while delighting the reader with hints of Franzen, McInerney, Baldwin. The specificity of the language is like fine lacework, a beauty to behold. This novel – a whodunit, a coming-of-age, a New York novel – heralds the arrival of a rarefied talent. Wow wow wow.' (Elin Hilderbrand, author of Swan Song)
'If Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, and Margo Jefferson somehow collaborated, this might have been the delightful result.' (Boris Kachka)
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