Goliath: A Novel
3.5/5
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About this ebook
A New York Times Editors' Choice Pick!
A Best Book of the Year for Time | NPR | The Guardian | Gizmodo| Portalist | New York Public Library
A Most Anticipated Pick for USA Today | Bustle | Buzzfeed | Goodreads | Nerdist | io9 | WBUR | Polygon | The New Scientist
Locus Award Finalist! Connecticut Book Award for Fiction winner! Dragon Award Finalist! Legacy Award Finalist!
"In this ambitious novel, dense with perspectives and social commentary, Onyebuchi dreams up disparate lives in a crumbling future America—with gentrifiers returning to Earth from space colonies and laborers trying to make a precarious living—while leaving room for moments of beauty and humor."—The New York Times, Editors' Choice
In his adult novel debut, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Award finalist and ALA Alex and New England Book Award winner Tochi Onyebuchi delivers a sweeping science fiction epic in the vein of Samuel R. Delany and Station Eleven.
In the 2050s, Earth has begun to empty. Those with the means and the privilege have departed the great cities of the United States for the more comfortable confines of space colonies. Those left behind salvage what they can from the collapsing infrastructure. As they eke out an existence, their neighborhoods are being cannibalized. Brick by brick, their houses are sent to the colonies, what was once a home now a quaint reminder for the colonists of the world that they wrecked.
A primal biblical epic flung into the future, Goliath weaves together disparate narratives—a space-dweller looking at New Haven, Connecticut as a chance to reconnect with his spiraling lover; a group of laborers attempting to renew the promises of Earth’s crumbling cities; a journalist attempting to capture the violence of the streets; a marshal trying to solve a kidnapping—into a richly urgent mosaic about race, class, gentrification, and who is allowed to be the hero of any history.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Tochi Onyebuchi
Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of Goliath, a Locus Award and Dragon Award finalist, the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African, its sequel, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls. His novella Riot Baby, a finalist for the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, the Ignyte, and the NAACP Image Awards, won the New England Book Award for Fiction and an ALA Alex Award. He holds a B.A. from Yale, a M.F.A. in screenwriting from the Tisch School for the Arts, a Master's degree in droit économique from Sciences Po, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School.
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Reviews for Goliath
35 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Multiple viewpoints made it a bit confusing at first but this novel is rich and sobering. I'm now reading Riot Baby, because Onyebuchi is a writer to savor and cherish.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A dystopia full of hope and history.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5There's absolutely no story here - just a bunch of random people doing random things in post-apocalyptic New York and chattering in a desultory, dull way that doesn't illuminate either the situation or their characters.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5While the themes in this book regarding racism, social justice, the climate, the pandemic are highly relevant to the ongoing events in the U.S. (and lets be real, our whole history) I just felt like I was missing something while reading. I felt like chapters bounced between different characters at a pace where I couldn't keep up. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be getting invested in everyone, or if some characters were just featured in one or two chapters as examples of how the setting and current events of the story impact everyone at large. I just felt confused, like something was going over my head. It could be that Onyebuchi's writing style just isn't for me, but this is his only work that I've read so far, so I'll need to read more. It's hard to explain, but I feel like the problem here is me, not the book. That said, there were still several very moving sections, even if I felt like I was missing out on something and, as I mentioned before, very relevant to current events.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath: A Novel extrapolates from the current world in which racial justice movements, climate change, and a global pandemic dominate the news while very little tangible progress occurs due to an economy and political system structured to benefit the wealthy and corporations. Onyebuchi’s depiction of the future reflects the current political-economic divide. He writes, “Even though distinctions of Northerner and Southerner have long since become irrelevant, the same fault line haunts this dilemma as has haunted the country since its founding, and it is everything from willful blindness to malicious intent that keeps discussion away from the demographics” (pg. 189). Drawing upon the lessons of the coronavirus pandemic, Onyebuchi writes, “America’s somehow the only country that could not only fuck up response to a global viral pandemic, but keep fucking it up, and you also got all the race laundry out in the open like that, and, granted, it’s stuff anybody with a brain and half a conscience knows about, but not it’s all happening out loud” (pg. 208). Onyebuchi concludes, “…If they all put their hands to the wall of this country’s history, one would find a single, uninterrupted bloodsmear, inclined inexorably toward oblivion” (pg. 303). His novel is science-fiction doing what it does best, holding a mirror up to the present time and using allegory to force the reader to confront their own reality. A must-read.