Loving Day

From the author of the critically beloved Pym (“Imagine Kurt Vonnegut having a beer with Ralph Ellison and Jules Verne.”—Vanity Fair) comes a ruthlessly comic and moving tale of a man discovering a lost daughter, confronting an elusive ghost, and stumbling onto the possibility of utopia.

“In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father’s house.”

Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and she’s been raised to think she’s white.

Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he’s never known, in a haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers.

A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and whites, fathers and daughters, the living and the dead,Loving Day celebrates the wonders of opposites bound in love.

Praise for Loving Day

“Writers who are as smart as Mat Johnson are rarely as funny, and those who are as funny are rarely as smart. He is unique, and simply must be read.Loving Day, a tender, ribald, fast-moving novel, is the perfect place to begin.”—Teju Cole, author ofOpen City

“Hilarious, sometimes discomforting, always brilliant, Loving Day tackles with heart and sly humor identity, family, and finding that elusive place where you belong. This is an awesome, viciously witty novel.”—Roxane Gay, author ofBad Feminist and An Untamed State

“Loving Day is wonderful satire, sharp and funny about so many contemporary themes and anxieties, including race, money, family, sex, and love. Mat Johnson has a deep comic gift, and his laughs always come with real thought and feeling.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and The Fun Parts

“This is what happens when races mix: Mat Johnson. Not a soul or a post-soul is spared in his brilliant and hilarious satire of modern American tribalism.”—Danzy Senna, author ofCaucasia

“Genius! Mat Johnson is hands-down one of my favorite novelists writing today. He writes about the difficult stuff—the stuff that matters—in the most humorous and heart-wrenching way.Loving Day is Johnson’s triumph and a reader’s great joy.”—Heidi Durrow, author ofThe Girl Who Fell From the Sky

“Since this is a book by Mat Johnson, one of the best American satirists since Mark Twain, I don’t have to tell you it’s as funny as it is smart.”—Emily Raboteau, author ofSearching for Zion

Mat Johnson is the author of the novels Pym, Drop, and Hunting in Harlem, the nonfiction novellaThe Great Negro Plot, and the comic books Incognegro and Dark Rain. He is a recipient of the United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. He is a faculty member at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.