The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

In 1972, workers digging in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, uncover a skeleton at the bottom of a well. The story then returns to Chicken Hill in the 1920s and 1930s, a poor neighbourhood where Black families, Jewish immigrants and other residents excluded from the town’s prosperity share businesses, music and uneasy alliances. Chona Ludlow’s Heaven & Earth Grocery Store becomes one of the community’s central meeting places.

When officials attempt to remove a deaf Black boy named Dodo to a state institution, Chona, her husband Moshe and their neighbours work to hide and protect him. Their resistance exposes the power of the town’s white establishment, including segregation, antisemitism, eugenic ideas and the Ku Klux Klan. The novel combines a delayed murder mystery with a community saga about how ordinary cooperation can oppose institutions that treat vulnerable people as disposable.