Limbo

“First time novelist, Sean Keith Henry, creates dynamic, multi-national characters to tell his . . . account of a minority living within a culturally unaware society.” —Altar Magazine

 “Limbo is a smart, honest novel about displacement and the meaning of home. It struggles in turn with the embracing of identity and the welcome comfort of escape.” —Percival Everett, author of Erasure, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

Limbo is the powerful and disturbing story of Pharaoh Chisholm’s cultural isolation and displacement when he and his family migrate from the multicultural mecca of Los Angeles, to Trondheim, a small, homogenous city hidden between fjords in the middle of Norway. One year after the birth of their beautiful daughter, Amaryllis, Pharaoh’s tempestuous relationship with a wayward father and an ambitious, proud, but childless sister deteriorates further as they are left behind with no one to fill Amaryllis’s void. Their bitter resentment results in their own alienation for they are shocked to think that Pharaoh has not only made a harrowing choice between Europe and America, but has deepened an existing, yet suppressed, racial gulf between both families that began with his marriage to Hannah Keilland.

Pharaoh not only has to confront the racial antagonism that is left behind, but must also struggle with a deep fear and paranoia in a society that represses individuality and brings him to the brink of a simmering rage which feeds and disguises the intense love he has for his daughter. Like James Baldwin’s themes of sexual and personal identity, Limbo allows the reader a penetrating glimpse of the struggles and nuances of cultivating both in a repressed and homogenous society.