The House of Broken Bricks

Williams’s lyrical and haunting debut delves into the troubles faced by a mixed-race family in the English countryside. Tess and Richard’s marriage is on the rocks, largely because Tess, who is Black and grew up in a Jamaican section of London, doesn’t feel accepted in the couple’s largely white agricultural community, and Richard, a farmer, is at a loss for how to support her. Their fraternal twin boys, Max and Sonny, are also struggling. Tess is often viewed with suspicion when she’s with the lighter-skinned Max (one chilling scene involves a librarian forcing Tess to prove her identity before allowing her to leave with Max), while the darker-skinned Sonny is given racist nicknames by his primary school classmates. Around the novel’s halfway point, Tess makes tentative plans to return to London with Sonny (her “mini-me”). In a twist that recasts much of the preceding narrative in a new light, her plans are disrupted by a tragic accident. The event is heavily foreshadowed and not particularly surprising, but its effect on the family is palpable. Williams skillfully juggles the perspectives of her four main characters to reveal their impressions of one another (Richard views Tess’s anger as a “harsh whip”) and evoke the pastoral landscape (Sonny finds the air “full of liquid skylark song”). Readers will be moved. (Apr.)