Book Club Guide

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

by James McBride · 2023 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The underground networks of the marginalised — how communities protect their own
Black and Jewish solidarity in mid-20th century America
What neighbourhoods are, and what's lost when they're destroyed

About this book

In 1972, workers digging a water main in Pottstown, Pennsylvania uncover a skeleton that unravels the hidden history of a neighbourhood shared by Black and Jewish communities in the 1930s. McBride's warm, morally complex novel is about the unlikely alliances between the marginalised and what a community of outcasts can offer each other.

Published in 2023, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store became one of the biggest literary bestsellers of the year. McBride drew on his own family history — his mother was a Jewish immigrant who converted and married a Black man in 1942 — and on extensive research into Pennsylvania Jewish communities.

Discussion questions

The novel's framing device — a skeleton found in 1972 — sends us back to 1936. What does this temporal remove achieve — and how does McBride use the gap between then and now?
The Jewish and Black communities of Chicken Hill are both marginalised, but differently. How does McBride show the specific nature of each community's vulnerability — and the specific nature of their solidarity?
Chona and Nate — the Jewish couple at the grocery store — become the novel's moral centre. What does McBride say through their choices about what it means to be responsible for others?
The deaf Black boy Dodo is the novel's most vulnerable figure. How does McBride use his situation — and what does the community's response to his danger say about what a community can and cannot provide?
McBride writes with great warmth and humour about poverty and exclusion. How does this tone function — and what would a more tragic or politically direct approach lose?