The Peach Seed

Longlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book PrizeNamed on the WABE Summer Reading List Named a Georgia Center for the Book “Books All Georgians Should Read”Essence, “15 New Books We Can’t Wait To Read This Summer”

“An epic, enchanting debut.”–Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle

“The sweeping story of a Black family in the South focuses on resilience and love…Jones is always insightful about family dynamics. And it’s a pleasure to see older people as main characters in a novel, depicted fully and without condescension. Engaging characters keep a complex multigenerational plot moving to embody decades of Black history.”–Kirkus Reviews

“Jones debuts with a layered saga of a Southern Black family that weaves stories of the slave trade and the 1960s civil rights movement….[she] manages to tie together the themes of ancestral heritage and the persistent power of love.”–Publishers Weekly

“Anita Gail Jones weaves together personal histories and the legacies that came before us in an expansive story about family and hidden histories. The world in this debut novel feels so lived in. Readers are drawn in by gorgeous passages about landscapes that dance with all five senses.”–Debutiful

“The Peach Seed is propulsive, yet thoughtful; sweeping but intricate; a tribute to the African American experience that captures its vastness and depth. Jones is an indispensable addition to the canon of Southern literature.”–Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of On The Rooftop

“Anita Gail Jones’s prodigious talents are on remarkable display in The Peach Seed. Her rendering of a fictional world, whether the exterior landscapes of Georgia and West Africa or the rich portraits of the interiors of southern homes, is truly impressive. Her dialogue resonates with clarity, compassion, and authenticity, rarely seen on the pages of fiction. She braids stories of the struggles and perseverance of African-Americans in distant centuries with those of more recent eras with remarkable dexterity, and her characters are thoroughly engrossing. This immensely well-crafted debut novel, gut-wrenching at times, hopeful at others, is a beautiful achievement.”–Jeffrey Colvin, award-winning author of Africaville

“Shockingly beautiful… . Rooted in specific American places and historical tragedies, The Peach Seed dares to center the pitch-perfect voice of its narrator, a voice that is lyrical, pastoral, and dazzling with the hot light of new insights into problems as old as a nation built on slavery and freedom. The novel is the fictional equivalent of genius Black Country music–it tells the gut-bucket truth with eclipsing beauty.”–Alice Randall, award-winning author of The Wind Done Gone and Black Bottom Saints

“A rich and layered tale about legacy, longing, and love, and about the importance of connection–to history, to family, to place, to community. In laying out the complex lives of her characters, Jones shows the many ways that the past resurfaces in the present as unfinished business. And on a deep, visceral level, Jones makes clear that our circle of connection to the lost African homeland remains unbroken.”–Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Fat Time and Song of the Shank

Anita Gail Jones is a visual artist and writer born and raised in Albany, Georgia. She is a Hedgebrook alumna, and a 2018-19 Affiliate Artist at The Headlands Center for the Arts. The Peach Seed, her debut novel, was a Novella semi-finalist in a William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, and was selected as a 2021 Top Ten Finalist in the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.