The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a novel by the American writer James McBride, published in 2023. It won the Kirkus Prize, and it moves between a police inquiry in 1972 and the decades when the Chicken Hill district of Pottstown was a working neighbourhood of Black and Jewish families.

The book begins with the discovery of a skeleton in the bottom of a well during excavation for a housing development, and with a mezuzah found nearby that leads investigators to the town's only remaining Jewish resident, Malachi, who lives in a disused synagogue. Hurricane Agnes then washes the crime scene away. From there the story settles into Pottstown in the 1920s and 1930s and the lives of Moshe and Chona Ludlow, who run a theatre with a dance hall and a grocery store, the Heaven & Earth of the title. Nate Timblin, who works for them, asks the Ludlows to hide a young deaf Black boy named Dodo from the authorities who mean to send him to the Pennhurst State School and Hospital.

The town's doctor, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, pushes the policies that would put Dodo away and courts the support of white residents, so the Black and Jewish families of Chicken Hill have to work out how far they will go for a child who belongs to both communities at once.