James McBride has won the prestigious National Book Foundation National Book Award for fiction with his novel The Good Lord Bird which is set during John Brown’s abolitionist campaign, a pivotal period of American history.
The citation says : McBride retells the story in a voice as comic and original as any we have heard since Mark Twain. The narrator is one Henry Shackleford, aka Onion, an escaped teenaged slave who accompanies Brown while disguised as a girl. Fondly portraying Brown as a well-meaning but unhinged zealot, The Good Lord Bird is daringly irreverent, but also wise, funny, and affecting. To read an interview with McBride go to http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2013_f_mcbride_interv.html.
About the Book: Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857, when the region is a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces. When John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, arrives in the area, an argument between Brown and Henry’s master quickly turns violent. Henry is forced to leave town—with Brown, who believes he’s a girl. Over the ensuing months, Henry—whom Brown nicknames Little Onion—conceals his true identity as he struggles to stay alive. Eventually Little Onion finds himself with Brown at the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859—one of the great catalysts for the Civil War.
Apart from McBride, The shortlisted authors were Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland, which had been short-listed for The Booker Prize, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, Rachel Kushner’s The Flame Throwers and Tenth of December by George Saunders.
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