The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

(Hardback)

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Description

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good.

There is fourteen-year-old Jael, who nurses a crush on the preacher's wife; the mother who bakes a sublime peach cobbler every Monday for her date with the married Pastor; and Eula and Caroletta, single childhood friends who seek solace in each other's arms every New Year's Eve.

With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are as seductive as they want to be, as vulnerable as they need to be, as unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be, and as free as they deserve to be.

Reviews

'Beautifully crafted. A lovely collection' - Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist

'Our new decade deserves a new literary force with major literary skills. Deesha Philyaw uses the comic, the allegorical, and the geographic to examine Black intimacies and Black secrets. Her work is as rigorous as it is pleasurable to read' - Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

'Deesha Philyaw's The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is startlingly fresh and flavoursome. These characters will blast through readers' preconceptions and win them over. All hail Philyaw for telling it like nobody else' - Emma Donoghue, author of Room and The Pull of the Stars

'Left me wanting more. Masterfully written. Deesha Philyaw knows the craft of writing as well as she does the nuances of sex' - Candice Carty-Williams

'This book is the one I've passed to friends, family and anyone else who will listen to me rave about how warm and wonderful this writing is. This collection is as wise as it is tender, the writing beautiful and honest. I'll be returning to these stories for a long time to come' - Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Open Water

Author Bio

Deesha Philyaw is an American author, columnist and public speaker. Her debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. It is currently being adapted for television by HBO Max. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and will be the 2022-2023 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.