Hell of a Book: National Book Award Winner

A Novel

De: Jason Mott

Narrado por: JD Jackson, Ronald Peet

***2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER***

***THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER***

Winner of the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize Finalist, 2022 Chautauqua Prize Finalist, Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing Shortlist, 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Shortlist, 2022 Maya Angelou Book Award Shortlist, 2022 Carnegie Medal Longlist

A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!

An Ebony Magazine Publishing Book Club Pick!

One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction | One of Philadelphia Inquirer's Best Books of 2021 | One of Shelf Awareness's Top Ten Fiction Titles of the Year | One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books | One of NPR.org's "Books We Love" | EW’s "Guide to the Biggest and Buzziest Books of 2021" | One of the New York Public Library's Best Books for Adults | San Diego Union Tribune—My Favorite Things from 2021 | Writer's Bone's Best Books of 2021 | Atlanta Journal Constitution—Top 10 Southern Books of the Year | One of the Guardian's (UK) Best Ten 21st Century Comic Novels | One of Entertainment Weekly's 15 Books You Need to Read This June | On Entertainment Weekly's "Must List" | One of the New York Post's Best Summer Reading books | One of GMA's 27 Books for June | One of USA Today's 5 Books Not to Miss | One of Fortune's 21 Most Anticipated Books Coming Out in the Second Half of 2021 | One of The Root's PageTurners: It’s Getting Hot in Here | One of Real Simple's Best New Books to Read in 2021


An astounding work of fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans and America as a whole

In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

As these characters’ stories build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.

Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists, it truly becomes its title.

More than thought provoking

This book makes you feel. It helps in understanding the helplessness and depth of what is (still) happening today for black males. And the human psyche of everyone. Highly recommend.

The writing is so good!

The narration was stellar. The author is so crafty. He carries you into his hell so artfully, that you don't even know you're there, until you are. A really deep journey that too many have had to travel for centuries.

Great Book

Highly recommend this touching book about the love of family and the reality of growing up Black and poor. Masterfully written and narration is excellent.

Touching Reality by Devolving the Surreal

What a special book. For what it seeks to do, does, and un-does, “Hell of a Book” is *important.*

Despite asserting itself as “fiction,” it simultaneously exists as autobiography and metabiography and self-criticism. From a swirl of contradictory, confusing, evolving narrative threads, an image emerges that transcends the material to connect us with a person who is real and representative, human and symbol. This connection is central to the effectiveness of the plot. Using tight, powerful prose, Mott compels us to accompany him down a personal rabbit hole, a whirlwind tale touring his first novel. What starts as a madcap adventure of excess and success changes gradually as he moves his readers out from under his skin and into his audience. The book deftly navigates multiple narratives, but progressively erodes the plot until we realize the story is the one that was always there, in the background, since before the book existed—one we might not have read if he hadn’t already told us we wouldn’t. It leans into the surreal, drawing us into unsuccessful efforts to sharpen blurred lines and comprehend the magical reality of its protagonists, until we are left holding only the stark truth of our actual shared reality. Only now we can see it for the surreal horror it is.

It is sublime and tragic, and at once, one of the most simple, compelling, and complex books I have ever read. I can’t recommend it strongly enough.

Well this was one hell of a book!

Jason Mott’s “Hell of a Book” is a novel about an author and his imaginary friend that go on a book tour. It’s almost mad-cap adventure with what happens to him on this book tour. This is one of the most creative novels I’ve read about being black in America.

“Hell of a Book” is a novel that confounds the normal parameters of storytelling. What starts out as a relatively straightforward tale about a Black author’s cross-country tour for his novel, also titled “Hell of a Book,” soon meanders into a broader meditation on mental illness, alcoholism, sex and painful grief. As soon as you think you know where the story is going, the lines between reality and imagination blur, thanks to an unnamed narrator who is unreliable and not entirely likable. It has more than its share of laugh out loud moments.

Recommended and a worthy, timely, entertaining while thought provoking winner of the 2021 National Book Award.