Those Bones Are Not My Child

Those Bones Are Not My Child is a novel by the American writer Toni Cade Bambara, published in 1999 and written over a period of twelve years.

The book is organised around one mother's search, and its scale comes from the fact that the search has to be repeated in every institution in the city: the police, the churches, the newspapers, the city government and the community groups that form and split as the months go on. Zala learns that her son is one of a number of missing children whose cases are being dealt with slowly, and the novel's treatment of the period is exact about the politics of a city that had begun to believe its own publicity. Bambara, who died in 1995, left the manuscript in the care of Toni Morrison, who edited it for publication, and it appeared after her earlier books, Gorilla, My Love and The Salt Eaters. It is a long and demanding novel, and it is unusual for treating a national scandal as a domestic emergency rather than as a case study.