The Hate U Give

The Hate U Give is a young adult novel by the American writer Angie Thomas, published on 28 February 2017. It is her first novel, and it grew out of a short story she wrote at college after the police shooting of Oscar Grant.

Starr Carter is the narrator. She is sixteen and black, she lives in a poor part of the city, and she goes to school in a prosperous white part of it, which means that she has learned to be two different people depending on where she is.

One night, on the way home from a party, she is in the car when a white police officer shoots and kills her friend Khalil. What she saw makes her part of a national news story, and she has to decide how far she is prepared to speak about it in public.

The book was published by Balzer + Bray, which had won a bidding war for it, and it went straight to number one on the young adult bestseller list, where it stayed for fifty weeks.