The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

Mathis traces the fates of Hattie’s 12 children and grandchildren over the course of the 20th century, simultaneously capturing the voices and daily minutiae of every one of her characters. The understated assurance with which the 39-year-old pulls off this trick – a complex and engrossing work that has huge commercial hit written all over it – is remarkable.

Sunday Times

This fresh, powerful first novel turns the lives of Hattie’s children into an epic of America in the 20th century. Tough, truthful, wonderfully controlled writing.

Kate Saunders, The Times

Ms. Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters’ stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison’s writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own — both lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral, and capable of giving the reader nearly complete access to her characters’ minds and hearts.

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

‘A vibrant and compassionate portrait of a family hardened and scattered by circumstance and yet deeply a family. Its language is elegant in its purity and rigor. The characters are full of life, mingled thing that it is, and dignified by the writer’s judicious tenderness towards them. This first novel is a work of rare maturity.'

Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of GILEAD and Orange Prize-winner of HOME

‘Beautiful and necessary from the very first sentence. The human lives it renders are on every page lowdown and glorious, fallen and redeemed, and all at the same time. They would be too heartbreaking to follow, in fact, were they not observed in such a generous and artful spirit of hope, in a spirit of mercy, in the spirit of love. A treasure of a novel.’

Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of TINKERS

This is a bold debut that sets out to address the huge themes of motherhood and US history through the tale of one dysfunctional family, and succeeds.

Financial Times

Without Oprah’s intervention, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie might have been one of the greatest novels of 2013. But now – just in time – it’s certainly one of the best of 2012.

Washington Post

This rich debut couldn’t be further from the straightforward 20th-century American family saga it appears at first to be . . . Spanning many decades, it is an intricate portrait not only of complex family ties, but also of one quietly strong woman who heads this complicated tribe of siblings, children and friends. With each chapter narrated by one of Hattie’s children, the power of Brooklyn author Ayana Mathis’ novel is in its ability to create distinctive yet precise characters brimming with recognisable humanity.

Psychologies Magazine

The opening chapter is a cracker, exquisitely written, full of vividly evoked tension and searing emotion. It is painful – relentlessly so – with a devastating coup de grace.

Scotland on Sunday

An unexpectedly uplifting reminder of the resilience of the human spirit

Good Housekeeping

As unremittingly bleak as her characters’ lives are, Mathis has not produced a grim novel: it is as much about our need for joy as it is about our struggles against bitterness. Written with elegance and remarkable poise … memorable and with the hint of something formidable glinting under the surface.

Guardian

This is an impressive debut: tender, tough and unflinching.

Daily Mail