John Woman

In Mosley’s offbeat and insightful novel (following Down the River unto the Sea), 16-year-old New Yorker Cornelius “CC” Jones—the brilliant son of an Italian-American flirt and an older black autodidact—spends his evenings in the early 1990s working his father’s job in a downtown theater while his father is ill at home. One night, in a moment of violence, CC kills the theater’s landlord; the crime will haunt him forever. He soon leaves New York under the new identity of John Woman and goes on to study at elite universities, creating a new intellectual movement around the unreliable nature of history. His skills and area of expertise lead him to the New University of the Southwest, a liberal college funded and staffed by members of a mysterious organization known as the Platinum Path, who have taken quite the interest in John and in the defining moments of his childhood and true past. Fast paced but still full of provocative questions about society, the story grounds the wilder aspects of its plot by providing a fascinating cast of endearing characters. Mosley’s novel is one to savor, and an unpredictable, unabashedly strange good time. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis Agency. (Sept.)