This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called.Baize Shephard. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson-but Long Division is set in 1985. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.īefore leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity.
Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fictionįrom Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” ( The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi.
