The Salt Eaters

'A book full of marvels' New Yorker 
 
The American Deep South, in the 1970s. Velma Henry, once a formidable political activist, has grown weary and disillusioned with the fight for civil rights. She wants to end it all. But then she finds herself in the hands of a Black faith community, and the fabled healer Minnie Ransom. As she works through the rage and fear of her traumatic past, Velma finds herself changing, becoming whole and, maybe, free. The Salt Eaters is a boldly optimistic, profound exploration of memory, the self, power and Black health as liberation. 
 
'A hymn to individual courage' The Times Literary Supplement 
 
'Her characters inhabit the nonlinear, sacred space and sacred time of traditional African religion' The New York Times Book Review

A hymn to individual courage, a sombre message of hope

Toni Cade Bambara's writing is so great it lifts you off the ground

Nobody writes with her breathtaking humour, empathy, ferocity, and surrealness ... her observation and humanity are timeless. As a reader, I release myself into Ms. Toni's sure and steady hands, knowing every part of me will be illuminated by her gaze

Author, activist, filmmaker and academic Toni Cade Bambara was born in Harlem, New York, in 1939. Bambara's award-winning fiction was celebrated during her lifetime for its centring of female characters and its grounding in African-American culture, spaces and dialects; she would later be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. She died in Philadelphia in 1995.

'A book full of marvels' New Yorker 
 
The American Deep South, in the 1970s. Velma Henry, once a formidable political activist, has grown weary and disillusioned with the fight for civil rights. She wants to end it all. But then she finds herself in the hands of a Black faith community, and the fabled healer Minnie Ransom. As she works through the rage and fear of her traumatic past, Velma finds herself changing, becoming whole and, maybe, free. The Salt Eaters is a boldly optimistic, profound exploration of memory, the self, power and Black health as liberation. 
 
'A hymn to individual courage' The Times Literary Supplement 
 
'Her characters inhabit the nonlinear, sacred space and sacred time of traditional African religion' The New York Times Book Review

Those Bones Are Not My Child

A magnum opus... Puts the reader at the heart of the horror that came to be called the Atlanta child murders

A full-bloodied, important book and an eloquent final testament of a writer whose art was always dictated to by her humanity and sense of justice

These Bones Are Not My Child isn't just a gripping thriller; it's a masterwork of American literature

Bambara has produced both a human drama and a steely report on contemporary society. . .admirable

Bambara's achievement - in this masterly work - is to voice this sense of loss, to give full human dimension to events that for too long many of us flashed by like billboards at highway speed

Captures for all time a nightmare of private hate and public racism

A woolly mammoth of a novel, truly worthy of being called an epic, a book with great big feet that sometimes take ponderous steps but that always hit the ground with the sound of thunder

Riveting... A carefully crafted mystery [that is] difficult to put down

Toni Cade Bambara's writing is so great it lifts you off the ground

Nobody writes with her breathtaking humor, empathy, ferocity, and surrealness... As a writer, her observation and humanity are timeless. As a reader, I release myself into Ms. Toni's sure and steady hands, knowing every part of me will be illuminated by her gaze

Author, teacher, activist and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara was born in Harlem, New York in 1939. After graduating from Queens College in 1959, she worked as a social investigator, and then in the psychiatry department of New York City's Metropolitan Hospital. She studied acting and mime in Florence and Paris, received an MA in 1964 from City College of New York, and went on to lecture in English at CUNY, Livingston College, and other universities. Bambara's involvement in the Black liberation and women's movements led her to edit and publish one of the first major anthologies of Black women's writing, The Black Woman, in 1970; the following year she published a collection of folktales, Tales and Stories for Black Folks, which celebrated what she dubbed 'Our Great Kitchen Tradition'. In 1972, Bambara published her debut collection of short stories, Gorilla, My Love, and then, in 1980, her first novel, The Salt Eaters, which won the American Book Award and the Langston Hughes Society Award. Upon her death in 1995, The New York Times praised Bambara as 'a major contributor to the emerging genre of contemporary black women's literature'. Her legacy was recognised with a posthumous induction into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2013.

'A magnum opus... Puts the reader at the heart of the horror that came to be called the Atlanta child murders' Toni Morrison 
 
Zala Spencer is barely surviving on the margins of Atlanta's booming economy when she awakens one summer's morning in 1980 to find her teenage son, Sonny, has disappeared. As uneasy hours turn into desperate days, Zala realizes that Sonny is among the many cases of missing children beginning to attract national attention. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the authorities, who respond to Sonny's disappearance with cold indifference, Zala and her estranged husband embark on an epic search. Through the eyes of a family seized by anguish and terror, we watch a city roiling with political, racial, and class tensions. 
 
 Written over a span of twelve years, and edited by Toni Morrison, who called Those Bones Are Not My Child the author's magnum opus, Toni Cade Bambara's last novel leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare.

Toni Cade Bambara

At once a gripping thriller and a heartbreaking elegy, this is Toni Cade Bambara's powerful final testament, a hymn to Atlanta's missing children. 
 
Zala Spencer is barely surviving on the margins of Atlanta's booming economy when she awakens one summer’s morning in 1980 to find her teenage son, Sonny, has disappeared. As she takes to the streets to track down what happened to him, Zala is drawn into the nightmare of a city stalked by fear. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Toni Cade Bambara

Books by Toni Cade Bambara

Series by Toni Cade Bambara

Brief Encounters

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