The Mothers
Seventeen-year-old Nadia Turner is grieving the suicide of her mother in a small Black Southern California beach town when she begins a secret summer affair with Luke Sheppard, the former football star and pastor's son. When Nadia gets pregnant and quietly ends the pregnancy, the choice ripples outward through their lives and through the church congregation that watches, prays, and gossips around them. Brit Bennett's debut novel follows Nadia, Luke, and Nadia's careful, faithful best friend Aubrey across more than a decade as the three of them try to outrun a single secret and the older generation of church mothers whose chorus narrates the book between chapters. Published in 2016, The Mothers is a quiet, exact study of the choices young women make and the communities that hold and harm them, and it announced one of the most assured new American voices of the decade.
Where The Mothers keeps showing up
Two of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about The Mothers
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Seventeen-year-old Nadia Turner is a college-bound senior in the Black church community of Oceanside, California when her mother shoots herself. That summer she begins seeing the pastor's son Luke, an injured former football star, and the choices the two of them make ripple across the next decade.
The most commonly searched is The Mothers by Brit Bennett (2016), her debut novel. The metadata above lists Bill Bryson in error. Bennett is also the author of The Vanishing Half.
Both novels are by Brit Bennett and share her interest in Black women, family secrets, and California settings. The Vanishing Half (2020) is more historical in scope; The Mothers is contemporary literary fiction.
The Mothers is 270 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Mothers takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
The Mothers is a standalone novel by Bill Bryson, not part of a series.
The Mothers is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
