Daughter - by Asha Bandele (Paperback)

About the Book

In a stirring first novel, the gifted and lyrical author of the acclaimed memoir "The Prisoner's Wife" "gives us another penetrating look at the endurance of love under harsh circumstances" ("Essence").

Book Synopsis

Daughter, a penetrating novel by Essence editor Asha Bandele and chosen by Black Issues Book Review as Best Urban Fiction for 2003, follows a young woman through life that changes in one night from a horrific incident with police brutality.

At nineteen, Aya is a promising Black college student from Brooklyn who is struggling through a difficult relationship with her emotionally distant mother, Miriam. One winter night, Aya is shot by a white police officer in a case of mistaken identity. Keeping vigil by her daughter's hospital bed, Miriam remembers her own youth: her battle for independence from her parents, her affair with Aya's father, and the challenges of raising her daughter. But as Miriam confronts her past--her losses and regrets--she begins to heal and discovers a tentative hopefulness.

Moving between past and present, the novel builds to a dramatic, heart-wrenching but ultimately redemptive conclusion. Daughter is a novel that appears to be about police brutality, but police brutality is only the landscape. The heart of the story is about the silence between generations--the secrets mothers keep from their children in an effort to protect them.

Review Quotes

Essence This lyrical writer gives us another penetrating look at the endurance of love under harsh circumstances.

The Washington Post A provocative meditation...Bandele's imagery is spare and effective...the kind of storytelling that resurrects lost family history.

Edwidge Danticat, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and the Dew Breaker A wonderful first novel about the very complex ties that bind mothers and daughters in pain, the inevitable sacrifices that redefine love, passion, and commitment. asha bandele proves here that she can do it all: poetry, memoir, fiction. And much like Asha's other work, Daughter will move and transform you.

Kimberly Elise, O, The Oprah Magazine My oldest daughter and I...had the same reaction; we think it's the best book we've read in a long time....This story is compelling and powerful and meaningful and keeps you thinking.

About the Author

Asha Bandele served as features editor and writer for Essence magazine, and a Revson Fellow at Columbia University. She is the author of the memoir The Prisoner's Wife and a collection of poetry. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her daughter.