Hell of a Book

Hell of a Book is a novel by Jason Mott about a Black author on a cross-country tour to promote his best-selling novel. As he moves from city to city and hotel to hotel, he keeps encountering a young Black boy he calls The Kid, who may or may not be real. Woven through his story is that of Soot, a boy growing up in a rural town in the recent past. As news of a police shooting dominates the headlines, the author's comic, chaotic tour turns into a meditation on family, art, money, grief and what it means to be Black in America. Blending humor, satire and heartbreak, the novel plays with the boundary between fiction and reality and with the stories people tell to survive. It won the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction.