Isaac's Song

“A touching and intimate portrait of a young man’s awakening written in beautifully transcendent prose. Isaac’s Song is the kind of book you finish and then go back and read all over again.” –Dolen Perkins-Valdez, New York Times bestselling author of Take My Hand“Isaac’s Song continues the tradition of Daniel Black making absolute beauty out of the so-called unspeakable. Here, though, the execution and soulful interventions create the most superb writing we’ve read in a long, long time. Daniel Black is a magician.” –Kiese Laymon, bestselling author of Heavy: A Memoir

“Isaac’s Song is an absolutely beautiful book. It’s a beautiful song of generational pain and love, a novel that is thrumming with truth and life.”–Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, New York Times bestselling author of Chain Gang All Stars

“Isaac’s Song is a beautiful, all-consuming novel about the complex relationships between fathers and queer sons, loss, grief, identity, friendship and love. I will read anything Black writes.”–De’Shawn Winslow, award-winning author of In West Mills and Decent People

“A heartbreaking journey that grips and holds you to the bitter end like a weighted blanket, reminding me of the lyrics from a gospel song, ‘We Fall Down but We Get Up, ’ and try again.”–Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner’s Bench

“As Isaac’s story unfolds, his song moves from its roots in pain, fury, and yearning and leads him toward knowledge, forgiveness, and a love of self that liberates as it lifts. This book is balm and tonic, impetus and light.”–Jabari Asim, New York Times Notable author of Yonder

“Isaac’s Song is not just a novel; it is an intimately personal story buried inside a multi-generational saga. It is a detailed account of a journey of self-discovery and a collective oral history. Dr. Daniel Black beautifully chronicles one man’s heroic quest to find the source of his generational trauma, a cure for his pain, and ultimately, himself.”–Michael Harriot, New York Times bestselling author of Black AF History

“Isaac’s Song is the lullaby we all need and the healing balm for generations to come. Isaac’s life journey detangles with precise and mesmerizing language. Passages seem to melt together in a luscious, page-turning reading experience that one must consciously slow down to fully absorb. This riveting and important novel offers as its refrain one of life’s greatest lessons: true freedom and liberation can only be achieved through unadulterated self-love.”–Joyce White, author of Ecology, Spirituality, and Cosmology in Edwidge Danticat

“Black offers a moving chronicle of a grieving queer Black man reflecting on growing up in Chicago… The writing is lyrical… and the character portrait takes on greater dimension as Isaac struggles with forgiving his late father. The author’s fans will love this tale of hard-won self-acceptance.”–Publishers Weekly

Daniel Black is an author and professor of African American studies at Clark Atlanta University. His books include The Coming, Perfect Peace and They Tell Me of a Home. He is the winner of the Distinguished Writer Award from the Middle-Atlantic Writer’s Association and has been nominated for the Townsend Prize for Fiction, the Ernest J. Gaines Award, and the Georgia Author of the Year Award. He was raised in Blackwell, Arkansas, and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.