Mama Day

Gloria Naylor is a brilliant word-worker and a breathtaking story-teller. Mama Day is her masterpiece

When you read Mama Day, and surely you will read it, 'surrender' to it. Don't worry about finding the plot. Let the plot find you. The different voices are beautifully realized ... Naylor has a dazzling sense of humour, rich comic observation and that indefinable quality we call 'heart'. - Los Angeles Times

One is quickly beguiled . . . so gracefully does Naylor fuse together the epic and the naturalistic, the magical and the real - New York Times

The novel's strength and passion come through in the rich detail of its voices - of lives lived, boundaries crossed, alliances forged or broken. Naylor creates a story as vivid as the incantatory prose she uses to tell it. We are made to care so much about the inhabitants of Willow Springs - most of all, its diminutive power-broker Mama Day - that one winces when she drops the angel-food cake pan; healers of this stature shouldn't have bad days - Boston Globe

Irrefutably, Gloria Naylor was one of the greatest novelists who ever lived. Every single one of her works was masterful, crafted with the kind of rare artistic brilliance that places her in extremely limited company. She is likely best known for her National Book Award-winning debut work, The Women of Brewster Place, but that is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Whether the divine Bailey's Cafe, the haunting Linden Hills, or the exquisite Mama Day (one of my favorite novels of all-time), Naylor's skill in weaving together culture, heartbreak, joy, magic, terror, laughter, pain, and love-which is to say, life-is extraordinary. There is something both mundane and cosmic about her writing that captures the human condition in a way that perhaps no other writer did or will. Her work is, for me, a shout, a praise song, a hosanna, a hallelujah, a Black fist in the air; ase! She holds a hallowed place in the canon, and also in hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits. She was one of the blessed ones

Resonates with genuine excitement...a big, strong admirable novel - New York Times Book Review

This is a wonderful novel, full of spirit and sass and wisdom, and completely realized - Washington Post