The Yellow House

A Guardian Book of the Year
A Sunday Times Book of the Year
One of Barak Obama's Books of the Year

'A brilliant account of life before and after Hurricane Katrina . . . Monumental' The Sunday Times

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's widowed mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in New Orleans East and built her world inside of it, raising twelve children with her new husband . When he died, six months after Sarah's birth, the house would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child.

The Yellow House tells a hundred years of the author's family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologised cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House is an astonishing memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority and power.

'Reading The Yellow House will not exactly resurrect 4121 Wilson Avenue. Nor will it repair what has been done to New Orleans and its inhabitants . . .[but] these pages might inspire you to sit with your mother, your grandmothers . . . to gather with your siblings for an evening on the stone slab where once your childhood home stood. With The Yellow House, Sarah Broom has shown us a way to go back home, perhaps to heal.' Casey Gerald, Observer Book of the Week

'Pared down to its studs, The Yellow House is a love story. It is a declaration of unconditional devotion and commitment to place' Los Angeles Times