Goliath (A Novel)

A fateful feud simmers between a preacher and his protégé in this luminous retelling of the story of David and Goliath, set on a family farm in the American South and against the backdrop of the Great Migration. Goliath will win hearts with its tenderness and thunderous power.

In 1910, at the tender age of fourteen, a young Black man named David Jeremiah Lightfoot inherits his father’s farm in Mississippi, a barren, cursed plot of land once known as Goliath. David has never lived outside Chicago, but despite his eldest siblings' warnings, he feels called south. He is determined to claim and farm the land more effectively than his father ever could. Once there, David confronts both literal and figurative giants. And soon a high-stakes struggle with the burden of his ancestors’ legacy intertwines his fate with that of his family, the land, and the surrounding community.

This multigenerational saga is narrated by David’s youngest son, Little Bit, a uniquely sensitive storyteller with immense love for his parents, his grandfather Big Man, his uncle Jonathan, his cousin, and his brothers and sister. Little Bit charts the dramatic twists and turns of his father's rise to a precarious pinnacle of wealth and power, studded as it was with quiet moments of sweetness, joy, and transcendent beauty.

At once a profound, heartfelt story about one tight-knit family and an elegant, propulsive tragedy, Goliath weaves together themes of destiny and redemption. It is a revelatory meditation on the deep, troubled ties between Black Americans and the very ground on which past generations toiled and lived.