Happy Land

“What a story! Happy Land is an exhilarating tale of perseverance, identity, and love that echoes across generations. This story of formerly enslaved families in the Blue Ridge Mountains who built a community against all odds will stay with me for a long time.”
—Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake

"Picture a time when a kingdom existed inside the confines of the Carolinas — a time when freedpeople were royalty.  What if that was your history, instead of the trauma of enslavement and generational poverty?  As Dolen Perkins-Valdez says in this astonishing, historical-based novel — a family tree isn’t just something you draw on paper.  It’s only when you’re rooted in the soil that your family once inhabited that your imagination can brush the sky.”
—Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author of By Any Other Name

"No one writes the historical novel quite like Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and with Happy Land, she’s at her brilliant best, opening History’s treasure-filled chest—and then, bringing that history to life.  Here is the Ancestor who cried, laughed, and hoped before any of us were born. Here is the vulnerable earth that tenders its secrets. In Happy Land, Perkins-Valdez offers the knowledge that we surely need: to move forward, we must understand what came before. Her existing fans will be so satisfied—and her new readers will be captivated."
—Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, New York Times bestselling author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois