The Travelers

An astonishing debut novel that bears witness to the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and the first term of Obama's presidency, The Travelers is both an intimate family portrait and a searing examination of America today.

'Regina Porter's sprawling, sparkling debut novel... is an exhilarating ride. Porter is a wickedly astute chronicler of human foibles.' Guardian 
 
As America recovers from the Second World War, two families' journeys begin. 
 
James Vincent, born in 1942 to an Irish-American family, escapes his parents' turbulent marriage and attends law school in New York, where he moves up the social ladder as a prosperous and bright attorney. 
Meanwhile, Agnes Miller, a beautiful black woman on date with a handsome suitor, is pulled over by the police on a rural road in Georgia. The terrible moments that follow make her question her future and pivot her into a hasty marriage and new life in the Bronx. 
 
Illuminating more than six decades of sweeping change - from the struggle for civil rights and the chaos of Vietnam to Obama's first year as President - James and Agnes's families will come together in unexpected, intimate and profoundly human ways. 
 
'American history comes to vivid, engaging life in this tale of two interconnected families (one white, one black) that spans from the 1950s to Barack Obama's first year as president...' Entertainment Weekly 
 
*LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2020*

The Travelers is a rare debut that heralds what should be a long and promising career.

Regina Porter’s sprawling, sparkling debut novel… is an exhilarating ride. Porter is a wickedly astute chronicler of human foibles. In her hands, this series of glimpses feels something like life itself.

Spanning six decades and three continents…[The Travelers] is held together by an elegant web of connections… Porter has a striking habit of telescoping time to chart individual trajectories… The often breathtaking immediacy and assurance of Porter’s prose carries you through.

If you’re looking for a poetic, spare, sometimes funny tale of ordinary people pining for meaningful connections — or if you’re someone who wishes Raymond Carver had published a novel — you have arrived.

This kaleidoscopic debut novel... deftly skips back and forth through the decades, sometimes summarizing a life in a few paragraphs, sometimes spending pages on one conversation. As one character observes, "We move in circles in this life."

[A] remarkable debut novel... There is a confidence to Porter's writing that makes it hard to believe that this is her first novel... The Travelers succeeds because Porter is so clear-eyed when documenting human interactions, the mass of particularities amounting to a gloriously and depressingly messy picture of life in America.

American history comes to vivid, engaging life in this tale of two interconnected families (one white, one black)… the complex, beautifully drawn characters are unique and indelible.

A sprawling, ambitious debut ... Beautifully written and intricately plotted.

An absolute wonder of a novel. A sweeping examination of race and class within America's troubled history. A love letter to fearless women laced with a sharp humour. I'm thrilled by the magnitude, ingenuity and heart of Regina Porter's daring vision.

In this innovative and deeply moving debut, Regina Porter has mastered the kind of alchemy found in a great painting by Poussin: her canvas is vast, her subject ambitious, and yet her execution is so brilliantly devoted to particulars that it creates a miraculous intimacy. The beauty of this book lies in how Porter's characters, through resilience and community, art and creative love, cut new doors out of the corners they've been backed into by history.

Thrillingly ambitious, deeply affecting ... There is so much offered here – race, history, love, loss, and family, just to name a few – that this debut novel should be considered nothing less than a supreme act of generosity.

The Travelers is a great, grand tabernacle of a novel, under the roof of which it seems the entire history of the United States and all its people has been gathered into a single blazing congregation. It is full of tales tall and short, lives black, white, and every shade between, from the north, the south, east, and west. None but the biggest-hearted, sharpest-eyed, most generous-spirited of writers could pull off a book like this. Regina Porter is some kind of visionary.

Regina Porter’s The Travelers is not only the compelling intergenerational saga of two intertwining families but also a deadpan and mordant chronicle of 20th-century America’s casual intolerance and racial violence, as well as a series of portraits of intrepid women, a celebration of family responsibility, and an impassioned reminder that we most honor those we loved by continuing to love others.

Jim Shepard, National Book Award shortlisted author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway

In The Travelers, generations of two families – one black and one white – journey across time, race, geography and the wounds of history with sweeping breadth and disarming intimacy. Porter's debut signals the arrival of a fully formed, singular talent. You've been wanting to read this book for a long time; it's just that Porter hadn't written it yet.

When the boy was four, he asked his father why people needed sleep. His father said, ‘So God could unfuck all the things people fuck up.’ 
 
*LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2020* 
 
As America recovers from the Second World War, two families’ journeys begin. James Vincent, born in 1942 to an Irish-American family, escapes his parents’ turbulent marriage and attends law school in New York, where he moves up the social ladder as a prosperous and bright attorney. Meanwhile, Agnes Miller, a beautiful black woman on date with a handsome suitor, is pulled over by the police on a rural road in Georgia. The terrible moments that follow make her question her future and pivot her into a hasty marriage and new life in the Bronx. 
 
Illuminating more than six decades of sweeping change – from the struggle for civil rights and the chaos of Vietnam to Obama’s first year as President – James and Agnes’s families will come together in unexpected, intimate and profoundly human ways. 
 
'Regina Porter’s sprawling, sparkling debut novel… is an exhilarating ride. Porter is a wickedly astute chronicler of human foibles. In her hands, this series of glimpses feels something like life itself.' Guardian

Regina Porter

An astonishing accomplishment . . . I would greedily follow this writer anywhere. . . . This is the Covid novel you didn’t know you wanted to catch

This novel is as gripping as it is clever

Regina Porter has written another marvel of a novel. The Rich People Have Gone Away gives the reader a spiraling cross-section of richly drawn, impeccably observed New Yorkers... A kind of masterpiece of human portraiture that simultaneously renders quintessential depictions of the city, of America, and of the whole world in these first fraught decades of the 21st century

Affecting, astounding and wholly humbling... Porter weaves beauty and humor with pathos, in prose that is winding, prescient and profound. She shows us worlds inside of worlds - of queerness, of love and relationships, of who we are and who we’re told to be - crafting a narrative that is both precise and thunderous. The Rich People Have Gone Away moves and transcends. We’re so lucky to have it

Riveting and original. The Rich People Have Gone Away mines the delicate and treacherous terrain in which human relationships and social divisions are rooted

Charmaine Wilkerson, author of Black Cake

A lush study of relationships, keen on the particulars of vast human catastrophes

Regina Porter’s wit and astute eye for detail made me want to both underline and inhale every line in the same breath. An immersive examination of the human condition in the face of tragedy and triumph

Zakiya Dalila Harris, author of The Other Black Girl

Exquisitely drawn characters, scenes that jump off the page, and international locales that'll make you want to pack a bag and go, The Rich People Have Gone Away is a novel that fearlessly defies conventions to deliver a satiating, five-star experience. A keen observer of people and class, Regina Porter has crafted an inventive, hilarious, and wholly unpredictable work full of vibrant prose and genuine tenderness. A seven-course meal that gets better and better

A glorious jambalaya of word, thought and feeling, Regina Porter's prose positively howls from the page. Just when you thought you didn't need another novel set in New York, you suddenly, desperately do

Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends

Almost uncomfortably apt in its depiction of human behaviour, impeccably accurate in its exploration of how easily we’re divided and incredibly funny even in the most un-funny moments, The Rich People Have Gone Away makes light and dark of one of the strangest times in human history and pulls you mercilessly along for a highly intelligent and thrilling ride

Ore Agbaje-Williams, author of The Three of Us

Wildly intelligent, brilliantly crafted, prismatic, living and breathing - a remarkable feat of sensation and humanity. Regina Porter is a marvel

Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had

A delight... Regina Porter is a writer of such wit, warmth and profound intelligence. Her indelible characters leap from her imagination to ours

Margot Livesey, author of The Road to Belhaven

Regina Porter trains her panoramic lens on lockdown New York in The Rich People Have Gone Away, an arresting novel of race, class, food, music, and family as thrilling and dynamic as the city itself

A layer cake of suspense. Regina Porter has created a vibrantly alive portrait of several generations of New Yorkers as they fearlessly stake their anchors in the rippling sea of our era

Kashana Cauley, author of The Survivalists

Porter’s story has the signposts of a mystery and the economically stratified ensemble cast of a social novel. In chapters centered on characters whose lives are disrupted by the couple’s drama and by lockdown, people sift through pasts whose cruelties match those of their pandemic present

Terrific . . . Inherent in any discussion of privilege must also be a discussion of race, and Porter examines these inseparable ideas with expert nuance in this novel

Porter’s story casts clear, vivid light on community, privilege, love, loss and the human dilemma—don’t expect to put this one down ’til you’re done

Settles its gaze on matters of race and class, underlined by its breathtaking ending . . . This restless, intentionally unsettling novel establishes Porter as a distinctive, confident literary voice

Brooklyn, 2020. Theo Harper and his blonde, blue-eyed, pregnant wife Darla head upstate to their summer cottage to wait out the lockdown. Not everyone in their fancy apartment building has this privilege: not Xavier, the restless teenager in the Cardi B t-shirt, nor Darla’s black best friend Ruby and her partner Katsumi, who stay behind to save their restaurant.During an upstate hike, Theo lets slip a long-held secret about his mixed-up ancestry. When Darla disappears after the ensuing argument, he suddenly finds himself the prime suspect at the centre of a front-page police search for the perfect missing woman…

Regina Porter

Praise for The Rich People Have Gone Away

A work of great ambition and elan

An astonishing accomplishment . . . I would greedily follow this writer anywhere. . . . This is the Covid novel you didn’t know you wanted to catch

This novel is as gripping as it is clever

A work of great ambition and elan

An astonishing accomplishment . . . I would greedily follow this writer anywhere. . . . This is the Covid novel you didn’t know you wanted to catch

This novel is as gripping as it is clever

A work of great ambition and elan

An astonishing accomplishment . . . I would greedily follow this writer anywhere. . . . This is the Covid novel you didn’t know you wanted to catch

This novel is as gripping as it is clever

Books by Regina Porter

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