The Names She Gave Us

Virginia Washington isn't supposed to be on the fourteenth fairway.
She's supposed to be in the caddie shack, counting her tips, waiting for her aunt to pull up in the Altima with the flickering tail-light. But it's late August in Baton Rouge, the light is doing the thing, and Virginia takes one swing with a borrowed seven iron that a wealthy white widow named Karoline Boudreaux happens to see.
What follows is a year of secrets. Virginia and her twin sister Nevada - named, with the rest of their sisters' ghosts, after the states their mother Vonetta wanted to see before diabetes took her at forty-one - start playing junior tournaments up and down the Gulf Coast, hiding every mile from their truck-driver father Marcus. He pulled out of their driveway before dawn on the morning their mother went into labor. He's been pulling out of it every morning since, and he does not yet know that his daughters are crossing the state lines he drives for a living.
From an unknown fairway in Louisiana to the Southeast Junior Championship in Atlanta, The Names She Gave Us is a novel about what a Black Southern family owes the dead and what it owes itself. About the cost of being seen. About the particular weight a girl carries when she is named after a place her mother never got to visit. And about the road atlas that sits, at the end, in the empty fourth chair at a kitchen table on Dayton Street.
For readers of Tayari Jones's Kin, Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half, and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Darryl Wayne Townsend Jr. is the author of seventeen books spanning literary fiction, thrillers, novellas, and nonfiction. His work lives in the spaces between people - the things they can't say, the things they won't say, and the things they say to the wrong person. His novels include Still Water, Rare Pull, Taylor, Glass Empire, and Heavy Load. His nonfiction includes The Catalog Mindset and Don't Blow the Bag. He is the founder of Polymath Portfolio Group LLC and hosts the podcast Wait a Minute, Bitch on Spotify. He lives in Seattle. He is not done.