The New Earth

A globe-spanning epic novel about a fractured New York family reckoning with the harms of the past and confronting humanity’s uncertain future, from award-winning author Jess Row 

For fifteen years, the Wilcoxes have been a family in name only. Though never the picture of happiness, they once seemed like a typical white Jewish clan from the Upper West Side. But in the early 2000s, two events ruptured the relationships between them. First, Naomi revealed to her children that her biological father was actually Black. In the aftermath, college-age daughter Bering left home to become a radical peace activist in Palestine’s West Bank, where she was killed by an Israeli Army sniper.

Now, in 2018, Winter Wilcox is getting married, and her only demand is that her mother, father, and brother emerge from their self-imposed isolations and gather once more. After decades of neglecting personal and political wounds, each remaining family member must face their fractured history and decide if they can ever reconcile.

Assembling a vast chorus of voices and ideas from across the globe, Jess Row “explodes the saga from within—blows the roof off, so to speak, to let in politics, race, theory, and the narrative self-awareness that the form had seemed hell-bent on ignoring” (Jonathan Lethem). The New Earth is a commanding investigation of our deep and impossible desire to undo the injustices we have both inflicted and been forced to endure. 

JESS ROW is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine, the essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, and two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. He’s received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award; his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, and many other publications. He teaches at NYU and lives in New York City and Plainfield, Vermont.