“Stories help us to survive the worst of times.”

The beloved international-bestselling author Julia Alvarez returns with her first adult novel in almost 15 years—just when we need her most.

Gabriel Bump grew up in Chicago's South Shore, an area known as the hometown of Michelle Obama and an area of great violence. His debut novel is about everyone living between those two extremes. “For a short story class, I wrote about a kid like me, a kid like most of the kids I knew, riding the bus and keeping his head down. That kid . . . turned into Claude McKay Love, the narrator of Everywhere You Don’t Belong.”