Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£14.99). Woodson does just that, weaving a narrative whose specificity yields an undeniable universality. As Sabe says, “If a body’s to be remembered, someone has to tell its story.” There is laughter and spirit, “fire and ash and loss”, blocks of gold hidden beneath squeaky stairs. Red at the Bone is pure poetry, filled with incantatory repetitions, soaring cadences, burnished images. The word “margarine”, for instance, conveys a world of socioeconomic differences the fierceness with which a baby latches on contains all the seeds of a complex mother-daughter relationship. Stretching back to the 1921 Tulsa massacre, from which Sabe’s mother and grandparents only narrowly escaped, and forward, to 9/11 and beyond, it’s a book that embraces class, desire, race, gender, ambition and tragedy, all with exemplary subtlety. Mothers with no desire to mother are an enduring taboo, but Woodson’s novel is about more besides. Having insisted on keeping the baby, Iris then flips the gender stereotypes and leaves Melody to be raised by her father and grandparents, heading off to faraway Oberlin College in an attempt to catch up with her own life. It’s Iris’s dress – the one she never got to wear, having already become pregnant by 16 – that Melody wears.Īloof and hungry, Iris is a difficult, brilliantly realised character, and one whom the author never judges. And then there are Melody’s unmarried parents: Aubrey, for whom parenthood has always been enough, even as a teenager and Iris, for whom the beginning of Melody’s life felt like the end of her own. We hear from her grandparents, too – fierce Sabe and tender-hearted Sammy. There’s Melody, of course, who’s defiantly chosen to descend the stairs, cotillion-style, to Prince’s Darling Nikki.

It unfolds through the eyes and voices of five characters spanning three generations. Having insisted on keeping the baby, Iris then flips the gender stereotypes and leaves Melody to be raised by her father The novel’s first word, it should be noted, is “But”, a conjunction that throws an elegiac spell over the pages that follow – of which there aren’t nearly enough – hinting at trouble that lies in the past or the future or perhaps both. The windows of their Brooklyn brownstone have been flung open and music spills out over the block inside, sunshine dances on hardwood floors as Woodson’s cast negotiates exquisitely judged joy and sadness. It’s a charged scene that sets the tone for all that’s to come.

Woodson red at the bone