{"title":"Books by Rachel Eliza Griffiths","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781399809832","title":"Promise","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e'A magical, magnificent novel, that amounts to a secret history of an America we think we know, but never really knew' Marlon James\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe people of Salt Point are afraid of the world beyond their rural town. Most of them are\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eborn, live and die never having gone more than twenty or thirty miles from houses that are crammed with generations of their families. But something shifts at the end of summer 1957. Change makes its way to Salt Point.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe Kindred sisters - Ezra and Cinthy - grew up with an abundance of love. Love from their parents, who let them believe that the stories they tell on stars can come true. Love from their neighbours, the Junketts, the only other Black family in town, whose home is filled with spice-rubbed ribs and ground-shaking hugs. And love for their adopted hometown of Salt Point, a beautiful New England village perched high up on coastal bluffs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut as the girls hit adolescence, their white neighbours, including Ezra's best friend, Ruby, start to see their maturing bodies and minds in a different way. And as the news from distant parts of the country fills with calls for freedom, equality, and justice for Black Americans, the white villagers of Salt Point begin to view the Kindreds and the Junketts as a threat to their way of life. Amidst escalating violence, prejudice, and fear, bold Ezra and watchful Cinthy must reach deep inside the wells of love they've built to commit great acts of heroism and grace on the path to survival.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn luminous, richly descriptive writing, \u003ci\u003ePromise \u003c\/i\u003ecelebrates one family's story of resistance. It's a book that will break your heart - and then rebuild it with courage, hope, and love.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e 'A novel so potent, one wonders if it's secretly a magic spell' \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eKiran Desai\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56298481975669,"sku":"9781399809832","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781399809832_8f12c01d-3a1b-4738-b200-3f81483a8d03.jpg?v=1786019386"},{"product_id":"9781399813952","title":"The Flower Bearers","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e'A beautiful and immensely powerful book about love, grief and finding a way to be in a forever altered world' J\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eulia Samuel\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, her closest friend, Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Rachel Eliza was learning to exist without her, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Rachel Eliza realized that to survive her heartbreak, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd so Rachel Eliza chronicles her seventeen years of friendship with Aisha. From the moment they met in a college library, she knew she had found a soul sister. Their life together was filled with music: they danced to records in their apartments and skipped from one sticky jazz bar to another. Sitting side-by-side at poetry circles, reading Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, marching through Harlem protesting lost Black lives, Rachel Eliza drew inspiration and strength from her friend. Together they learnt to embrace themselves, as writers, artists, and Black women.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRachel Eliza interweaves this love story with another, that of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the depth of their connection. Celebrating the ways that these two extraordinary people have transformed her life, she reflects on the beauty and pain that come with opening oneself fully to love.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":56368810983797,"sku":"9781399813952","price":22.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57682657673589,"sku":"9781399813990","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781399813952_82565411-e770-4256-9ef1-786328c5bdf4.jpg?v=1792511566"},{"product_id":"9781324020165","title":"Seeing the Body","description":"\u003cp\u003ePoems and photographs collide in this intimate collection, challenging the invisible, indefinable ways mourning takes up residence in a body, both before and after life-altering loss.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn radiant poems—set against the evocative and desperate backdrop of contemporary events, pop culture, and politics—Rachel Eliza Griffiths reckons with her mother’s death, aging, authority, art, black womanhood, memory, and the American imagination. The poems take shape in the space where public and private mourning converge, finding there magic and music alongside brutality and trauma. Griffiths braids a moving narrative of identity and its possibilities for rebirth through image and through loss.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA photographer as well as a poet, Griffiths accompanies the fierce rhythm of her verses with a series of ghostly, imaginative self-portraits, blurring the body’s internal wilderness with landscapes alive with beauty and terror. The collision of text and imagery offers an associative autobiography, in which narratives of language, absence, and presence are at once saved, revised, and often erased. \u003cem\u003eSeeing the Body\u003c\/em\u003e dismantles personal and public masks of silence and self-destruction to visualize and celebrate the imperfect freedom of radical self-love.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56419780821365,"sku":"9781324020165","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781324020165_99898ebf-db97-4e7a-bb14-99fd009e99b7.jpg?v=1786445862"},{"product_id":"born-among-mirrors","title":"Born Among Mirrors","description":"\u003cp\u003eReflecting on the near-loss of her husband and the death of her mother and a beloved friend, Rachel Eliza Griffiths calls upon some of her most beloved poets-Federico Garcia Lorca, Henry Dumas, Sylvia Plath, Sonia Sanchez, and others-to guide her through a scarred wilderness in search of wonder, love, and companionship. In \u003cem\u003eBorn Among Mirrors\u003c\/em\u003e, she gathers a wide range of contemporary and historical artists and themes: some poems employ Coltrane's four pillars of \u003cem\u003eA Love Supreme\u003c\/em\u003e and Freytag's Pyramid dramatic structure; others praise a diasporic village of Black poetry where voices of both the dead and living call and respond or are named for visual effects of formal photography and nod to popular films, such as Wim Wenders' \u003cem\u003ePerfect Days\u003c\/em\u003e and Ridley Scott's iconic \u003cem\u003eThelma and Louise\u003c\/em\u003e. As Griffiths journeys through the complicated dynamics of loss, she befriends grief, accepting the alchemy, transformation, clarity, and risk required to live beyond mere survival.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57555321487733,"sku":"9781324105626","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-rachel-eliza-griffiths.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}