Hell of a Book

A Novel

By: Jason Mott

Narrated by: JD Jackson, Ronald Peet

Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

***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, and the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize shortlist

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.

©2021 Jason Mott (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

Aspen Words Literary Prize, 2021

Carnegie Medal, 2022

Joyce Carol Oates Prize, 2021

National Book Award, 2021

Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, 2021

“Hell of a Book more than lives up to its title. Playful, searching, raw, and necessary, this writing, this voice, this novel twisted me up and turned me inside out, dazzled me, surprised me and moved me.” (Charles Yu, author of the National Book Award winner Interior Chinatown)

“What a powerful, timely, and provocative novel. Jason's ability to take on deeply important themes with both poignancy and humor makes for an extraordinary emotional rollercoaster of a read, and I tore through this profoundly moving novel in a day but have been thinking about it ever since. Thank you, Jason Mott, for sharing this story with the world.” (Abi Daré, New York Times best-selling author of The Girl with the Louding Voice)

“It is a story of love and family. It is powerful...poignant and beautiful and what makes me so excited is I cannot wait to be part of these conversations.... It’s a story of race, family, love, and justice. It’s original and Jason Mott is a talent.” (Jenna Bush Hager, “Read with Jenna”)

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.

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.

Book of Love

Book of Love, loving self, loving others by the path one person took getting there. This is a book of Hope and we all share in the Hope we will get there!

Slow start but worth finishing.

This is a good book that talks about being a black person in present day America. The story starts of with a boy and a man who imagines things and reality and imagination get interwoven for him. There is a short of mystery that unravels as one reads the book. It is a love story but not in the typical way, more on a metaphorical level. One thing that makes the book interesting is all of the little references the narrator uses: everything from Greek mythology to the illuminati at the Denver Air port. the references show off the authors intelligence but gives the book the lightheartedness that it needs.

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.

A Catcher In The Rye For Our Times and Beyond

It was a damn good book. My congratulations to this who selected it.
It started out with humor. Otherwise I might have put it aside. He has three or so girlfriends named Kelly. I kept having girlfriends of the dame name too. Anyone else? His portrayals of the publisher and publicist were hilarious.
It is a great success in portraying the impact of growing up while black, parenting while black; and adulting while black.
It is the Cathcer On the Rye of its TIme. Catcher took us into the mind of Holden. This took us into the mind of a Black Everyman, accused of proving that things aren’t so and for Blacks in America because after all, our hero has become a writer, a success. And not a basketball p[layer but a WRITER a man of letters.
He’s burst through all the stereotypes. He wears khakis, eventually coached into a sport jacket. Soot wears a hoodie, though. . Like Cathcer, it is a story of angst self doubt, failure, and depression.

In Cathcer it was teen aged angst. Here is it back angst. But, these are universal. We all have angst. We all have self-doubts. We all have a t the least moments of sadness. This would be a good book to add or replace Catcher on high school reading lists. like Catcher, which may have emerged and touched a nerve in a period of malaise this book is right for out time biggest societal debate.
In the book there is talk of a son writing to keep a mother alive after her death. I wrote a play about my mother after her death. Oh, excuse me. Sharon from the book would tell told me never to say play, USE THE TITLE. The title is The Pickpocket’s Daughter, opening here at The Studios of Key West May 18th, 2022.

Satisfying and contemplative

This is one of those books that is initially and instantly accessible, that draws you in with questions and leaves you wondering and musing about the plot and direction, but ultimately you understand it’s a mirror or multiple mirrors reflecting us and our reality. Beautifully written and read, funny at times, and tragic at others. This is the book you hope Audible or a friend brings to your attention. If you want a linear, predictable, typical story with an arc and a climax, etc. this is not it. And this book does not shy away from hard topics, but instead almost unexpectedly (sometimes comically) stumbles into them, then stops and sits with them.

Important

For me, a heartbreaking, intimate, intelligent look into what it must be like to be black. I hope I’ll never be the same for reading this book.