The Atlas of Reds and Blues: A Novel

Named a Washington Post Best Book of the Year

“The entire novel takes place over the course of a single morning… and the effect is devastatingly potent.” —Marie Claire

When a woman–known only as Mother–moves her family from Atlanta to its wealthy suburbs, she discovers that neither the times nor the people have changed since her childhood in a small Southern town. Despite the intervening decades, Mother is met with the same questions: Where are you from? No, where are you really from? The American-born daughter of Bengali immigrants, she finds that her answer–Here–is never enough. Mother’s simmering anger breaks through one morning, when, during a police raid on her home, she finally refuses to be complacent–and suffers all-too-familiar consequences.

“Devi S. Laskar’s The Atlas of Reds and Blues is as narratively beautiful as it is brutal… I’ve never read a novel that does nearly as much in so few pages.” –Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy