From a prize-winning storyteller, this New York Times bestseller shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, and that the communities we build are fragile but vital. It is very funny in places, and heartbreaking in others.

The repercussions of that moment draw in the whole community, from Sportcoat's best friend - Hot Sausage - to the local Italian mobsters, the police (corrupt and otherwise), and the stalwart ladies of the Five Ends Baptist Church.ĭEACON KING KONG is a book about a community under threat, about the ways people pull together in an age when the old rules are being rewritten. In a housing project in south Brooklyn, a shambling old church deacon called Sportcoat shoots - for no apparent reason - the local drug-dealer who used to be part of the church's baseball team. This alone may qualify it as one of the year's best novels.' The Washington Postįrom the winner of a National Book Award and author of the bestselling memoir,The Color of Water, and The Good Lord Bird, soon to be a TV series starring Ethan Hawke 'A hilarious, pitch-perfect comedy set in the Brooklyn projects of the late 1960s. (Mar.THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK This generous, achingly funny novel will delight and move readers. With a Dickensian wealth of quirky characters, a sardonic but humane sense of humor reminiscent of Mark Twain, and cartoonish action scenes straight out of Pynchon, McBride creates a lived-in world where everybody knows everybody’s business. As Deems’s crew ineffectually try to murder Sportcoat, Elephant follows clues left by his dead father to find a hidden treasure, and Potts tries to keep the neighborhood safe while falling for the wife of a preacher, McBride unravels the mystery of Sportcoat’s inexplicable ire against Deems.

This sets in motion a hunt for Sportcoat by Deems’s employers that draws in Tommy “Elephant” Elefante, a sweetly melancholy Italian mover of “hot goods” whose grip on the neighborhood is slipping, and scrupulous police officer “Potts” Mullen, who is on the brink of retirement.

McBride ( The Good Lord Bird) delivers a sharply compassionate shaggy dog tale of a heavy drinking Baptist deacon who shoots a drug dealer and becomes a “walking dead man.” In the autumn of 1969, handyman and occasional baseball coach Deacon Cuffy Lambkin, known to his friends as “Sportcoat” because of his colorful wardrobe or as “Deacon King Kong” on account of his equal affection for a moonshine with that name, inexplicably shoots off the ear of Deems Clemens, Sportcoat’s former baseball protégé.

Book review of deacon king kong