Goliath (A Novel)

In the early days of the Great Migration as Black Americans go northward, one man goes the opposite way: he returns to Mississippi to reclaim his father's land.

"The beautiful, brutal landscape, the love, the evil, the joys and the sorrows of one family left me feeling I had just lived a second life." —ABRAHAM VERGHESE, author of The Covenant of Water

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 he feels called south and 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 his ancestors' legacy intertwines his fate with that of his new family, their land, and the surrounding community.

This multigenerational epic 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 siblings. 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 land ownership, inheritance, and the deep, troubled ties between Black Americans and the very ground on which past generations toiled and lived.