Good Dirt

Good Dirt is a 2025 novel by the American writer Charmaine Wilkerson. It begins with a death: Ebby Freeman was ten years old when she heard the gunshot that killed her brother Baz, next to the pieces of a jar that had been in the family for centuries.

The killing was never solved, and the novel follows Ebby into adulthood, where a new relationship brings her and her family back into public view. The jar and the family's history are part of the story, and the book moves between the present and the past of the people who owned it, with the reopened case supplying the pressure on everyone in the household and the reader learning what happened in the same order the family does.

Wilkerson writes about family memory and inheritance, and the novel uses the object at its centre to connect generations. It is her second novel, following Black Cake, and it is built on the same interest in family histories and in the objects that outlast the people who owned them.