Goliath

Goliath

“Onyebuchi sets fire to the boundary between fiction and reality, and brings a crumbling city and an all too plausible future to vibrant life. Riveting, disturbing, and rendered in masterful detail.”—Leigh Bardugo In his adult novel debut, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Award finalist and ALA Alex and New England Book Award winner Tochi Onyebuchi delivers a sweeping science fiction epic in the vein of Samuel R. Delany and Station Eleven In the 2050s, Earth has begun to empty. Those with the means and the privilege have departed the great cities of the United States for the more comfortable confines of space colonies. Those left behind salvage what they can from the collapsing infrastructure. As they eke out an existence, their neighborhoods are being cannibalized. Brick by brick, their houses are sent to the colonies, what was once a home now a quaint reminder for the colonists of the world that they wrecked. A primal biblical epic flung into the future, Goliath weaves together disparate narratives—a space-dweller looking at New Haven, Connecticut as a chance to reconnect with his spiraling lover; a group of laborers attempting to renew the promises of Earth’s crumbling cities; a journalist attempting to capture the violence of the streets; a marshal trying to solve a kidnapping—into a richly urgent mosaic about race, class, gentrification, and who is allowed to be the hero of any history.
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Reviews

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Lindsay@schnurln
3.5 stars
Feb 6, 2022

Highlights

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Lindsay@schnurln

You know how sometimes you’ll be in a depressive episode and it feels like you’re locked in a room with no ventilation? No windows, no doors. And there’s no conceivable way of getting out. And someone on the outside, someone bigger than the whole room, keeps raising the temperature. Up and up and up and up and up. Till you’re suffocating, and you’ll do anything to get out. Even something stupid.

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Lindsay@schnurln

But, yeah, I can’t say either way whether that girl was dancin’ out of respect or disrespect, but it looked like she was moving out of love. You know how sometimes you do things that look damn near inscrutable from the outside as a way to deal with your grief? Maybe you’re even a mystery to yourself. But your mind gets out of the way and you just let your body move. Most times, people just collapse, like all their bones disintegrated at the same time, but sometimes you do the opposite. Grief sets you on fire. Sometimes, you see bursts of that where I’m from or where I been in my life. Enough people dying and someone’s bound to dance on a casket.

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Lindsay@schnurln

“You play Spades like your whole reputation, your 401( k), and your credit score are on the line. A person will form their entire opinion of you based on that Spades game. How valuable you are to them.”

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Lindsay@schnurln

And you realize that even then, when the streets were animated with socio- economic caste struggle, this was a place with all history and no future.

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Lindsay@schnurln

They said gang, and he knew they meant Black. They said thugs, and he knew they meant the n- word.