Child and God

Child and God knows how to break a believer’s heart. Not even faith can save you when the choice is between following god or your own heart, and when the price comes, everybody has to pay. Here we have magic and loss, love and remembrance, transcendence and devastation, all told in a conjuring of words and sentences that will leave you gasping in wonder. * Marlon James *
Child and God is a rapturous, beautiful novel. Kevin Quinn writes about faith, callings and desire in a way that brings his characters to life in all their depth and complexity. This debut is vivid and moving and utterly transporting. * SEÁN HEWITT *
Written with equal parts compassion, conflict and contempt, Kevin Quinn’s Child and God reads something like Go Tell It on the Mountain for nineties Detroit, tracing the members of a Pentecostal household and the ways in which the pressures of family and faith alter their trajectories. A novel, ultimately, concerned with the possibility of transcendence—be that the hope of rising above the banalities of existence through a close contact with the divine, or a deep yearning to escape the strictures of the church and personal circumstance through the messy joys of life. * Jon Doyle *
Quinn writes with an exquisite attention to language, conjuring a world that feels intimate and richly textured. Child and God draws us deep into its private rituals, desires, tensions, and devotions of a Black Pentecostal family in Michigan, rendered with a tenderness and remarkable lyric precision. There are sentences here so beautiful you could hang them in a museum. * Saleem Haddad *
A lyrical marvel, Child and God elegantly dances between scripture and speech, consciousness and history, and with all of it creates nothing short of poetry. Though deft in its rendering of the particulars of Black middle-class Detroit in the 90s, this is also a universal family novel about the innate tensions between the passions of the individual and the demands of the family unit. Through spirituality, self-discovery, and sex, Quinn plumbs all the fumbling ways we strive towards the sublime. * Rob Franklin *
Kevin Quinn uses the story of a single family as a window into the contours of desire, belief, shame, and obligation. Astonishing, exhilarating, and full of language that is beautifully precise, Child and God is nothing short of a marvel. * Angela Flournoy *
A masterful triumph, from a debut writer whose works feels as if it has existed for years. * Taiye Selasi *

Kevin Quinn was born in Detroit and received his BA in English from Yale University. Thereafter, he spent the better part of twenty years teaching high school English in New York, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. He is senior editor of Citizen magazine, an annual print publication covering Black art and culture, and has reviewed books for the South China Post Magazine in Hong Kong and Politico.

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