Author: Gwendolyn Brooks
Publisher: Faber
Paperback
Staff Pick! Sam says…
Maud Martha is the only novel by the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and it’s just been re-issued in a handsome volume by Faber. It’s an absolute gem, a series of vignettes in the life of the eponymous main character, from her childhood to life in an apartment building on the South Side of Chicago. It’s basically a high literary version of the meme: expectation vs reality. It’s a real pleasure to read (the rhythms of the prose really let you know that you’re in the hands of a poet), while also being structurally slyly subversive. It stays with you!