Author Guide · Fiction and Memoir
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McBride was a jazz saxophonist and a newspaper reporter before he was a novelist, and both jobs are audible in the prose. He spent fourteen years coaxing his mother into telling him her story — she was born the daughter of a Polish Orthodox rabbi, converted, married a Black minister and raised twelve children in the Red Hook projects — and the memoir that came out of it has sold more than two million copies. Since then he has written about John Brown, James Brown, a Brooklyn housing project and a Pennsylvania hill where Jewish and Black neighbours conspired to save one deaf boy. He is very funny about serious things, which is rarer than it sounds.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Fiction · Memoir · Literary Fiction · Updated September 2026
“That's the America I live in” — McBride on the country he actually sees
Quick facts about James McBride
The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
McBride alternates his own chapters with his mother's, in her voice. Ruth McBride Jordan was born Ruchel Zylska in Poland, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi; she fled the American South, married a Black minister, converted, helped found a Baptist church in Brooklyn and raised twelve children in the projects on almost nothing. Asked what colour God was, she told her son: the colour of water.
He spent about fourteen years getting her to talk, and she did not want the book written. That reluctance is in every chapter and it is what makes it more than a family history. Over two million copies sold and it is still taught in American schools.
Miracle at St. Anna
Four Black soldiers of the segregated 92nd “Buffalo” Infantry Division are stranded in a Tuscan village in 1944, sheltering an Italian boy. His first novel, and the one Spike Lee filmed in 2008 from McBride's own screenplay.
Uneven, and he was clearly still working out how to hold a novel together. Worth it for the material, which almost nobody else has written about.
Song Yet Sung
Maryland's Eastern Shore in the 1850s. An escaped enslaved woman who dreams the future is pursued across marsh and water by slave catchers, watermen and a legendary tracker. The dreams she has are of our present, which she does not understand.
The device could have been a gimmick and is not. It is the book where you can feel him getting the historical register right for the first time.
The Good Lord Bird
Henry “Onion” Shackleford, an enslaved boy mistaken for a girl, is swept up by the abolitionist John Brown and rides with him to Harpers Ferry. It is a comic picaresque about the most humourless subject in American history, and it won the National Book Award for Fiction.
The judges said he had a voice as comic and original as any since Mark Twain, and for once a prize citation is exactly right. Ethan Hawke played Brown in the 2020 Showtime adaptation.
Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul
Not a conventional biography. McBride goes looking for James Brown through the people around him — the sidemen, the lawyers, the childhood friends, the wrecked estate — and finds a story about money, race and what America does to the people it takes everything from.
The reporter's book. It is also the one where his own musicianship pays off most directly: he can hear what Brown was doing, and he can explain it.
Five-Carat Soul
His first fiction collection, and deliberately unruly: a Civil War toy-train mystery, a boys' band in a housing project, a set of talking-animal fables about a lion who will not accept his own kingship.
Nobody's favourite McBride, but the range is the point. He is trying things here that show up fully formed in the two novels that follow.
Deacon King Kong
In September 1969, a hard-drinking Baptist deacon called Sportcoat walks into the plaza of a Brooklyn housing project and shoots a young drug dealer in front of everyone. The novel is what happens next, across the church, the mob, the police and the neighbourhood.
The funniest book on this list and the most generous. Almost every character gets a moment where you understand exactly why they are the way they are. An Oprah's Book Club pick, and it won the Anisfield-Wolf, the Carnegie Medal and the Thurber Prize for American Humor in the same year.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
A skeleton turns up in a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania in 1972, and the story reaches back to Chicken Hill in the 1920s and '30s — a hillside neighbourhood where Jewish immigrants and Black neighbours lived alongside each other and, when the state came for a deaf Black boy, conspired to hide him.
The book where the two halves of his own inheritance finally sit in one story without being explained. It won the Kirkus Prize and a National Jewish Book Award, and it is the one to give someone who has never read him but reads a lot.
James McBride's Writing Style: The Reporter, the Saxophone and the Joke
McBride writes comedy about atrocity. That is the whole method, and it is why he divides readers. John Brown's raid, the Magdalene-scale cruelty of a state institution, a shooting in a housing project — all of it arrives inside a voice that is fast, warm, gossipy and frequently very funny. The comedy is not relief from the subject. It is how the people in the books survive the subject, and he refuses to write them as anything less than fully alive.
The reporter shows in the structure. He builds books out of many small, well-observed lives rather than one arc: Deacon King Kong and The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store both work by moving between a dozen characters until the neighbourhood itself becomes the protagonist. Fifteen years of newspaper work taught him to get a person on the page in three sentences, and he never lost it.
The musician shows in the sentences. He writes long, accumulating paragraphs with a strong rhythmic pull and a habit of ending on a short, hard clause — the same shape as a horn phrase resolving. Read a page of Deacon King Kong out loud and the timing is unmistakable.
And underneath all of it is the argument he has been making since 1996: that American identity is more mixed, more improvised and more decent at the neighbourhood level than the national conversation allows. His mother's story is the origin of that argument, and every book since has been another version of it.
James McBride Books in Order
In publication order: The Color of Water (1996), Miracle at St. Anna (2002), Song Yet Sung (2008), The Good Lord Bird (2013), Kill 'Em and Leave (2016), Five-Carat Soul (2017), Deacon King Kong (2020) and The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023). He also contributed to Hard Listening (2013), a group memoir by the Rock Bottom Remainders, the author rock band he plays saxophone in.
There is no series and no continuity, so you can read them in any order. The useful sequence is by ambition rather than date: The Color of Water, then Deacon King Kong, then The Good Lord Bird, then The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. That takes you from the memoir that explains where the material comes from, through the funniest book, to the two that show what he can do with a full cast.
Where to start with James McBride
If you have never read him
→ The Color of Water. It is the book that explains every book after it, and his mother is one of the great characters in American memoir — not because she is admirable, though she is, but because she is so completely herself.
If you want the one that won everything
→ The Good Lord Bird. A National Book Award for a comic novel narrated by a boy in a dress riding with John Brown, which tells you most of what you need to know about McBride.
If you want to laugh and then be caught out
→ Deacon King Kong. It opens with a shooting and stays funny anyway, and by the end you will have been talked into caring about roughly twenty people.
If you read non-fiction
→ Kill 'Em and Leave. His James Brown book is really about what American fame costs the people it lands on — and it belongs alongside my best investigative journalism books list.
If you want the recent one everyone was reading
→ The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. The most accomplished of the novels and the easiest to give as a gift.
Frequently asked questions about James McBride's books
Is The Color of Water a true story?
Yes, it is a memoir rather than a novel. McBride alternates his own account of growing up in Brooklyn's Red Hook projects with his mother Ruth McBride Jordan's first-person account of her life — she was born Ruchel Zylska in Poland, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, and spent decades refusing to discuss her past. He worked on the book for roughly fourteen years before it was published in 1996.
Did James McBride win the National Book Award?
Yes. He won the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction for The Good Lord Bird, his comic novel narrated by an enslaved boy who rides with the abolitionist John Brown. He also received the 2015 National Humanities Medal from President Obama and, in 2024, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction for his body of work.
Is The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store based on a true story?
It is fiction, but it is anchored in a real place: Chicken Hill, a historically Jewish and Black neighbourhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The novel opens with a skeleton found in a well in 1972 and reaches back to the 1920s and '30s, when the neighbourhood's Jewish immigrants and African American residents band together to keep a deaf Black boy out of a state institution. The characters and the well itself are invented.
Is James McBride Jewish?
His mother was born Jewish, the daughter of a Polish Orthodox rabbi, but she converted to Christianity after marrying McBride's father, a Black minister, and helped found a Baptist church in Brooklyn. McBride was raised Christian, and much of The Color of Water is about discovering his mother's Jewish origins as an adult. That double inheritance runs through his work and is most explicit in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.
How many books has James McBride written?
Eight under his own name, published between 1996 and 2023: two works of non-fiction, one short story collection and five novels. He also contributed to Hard Listening (2013), a collaborative memoir by the Rock Bottom Remainders, and wrote the screenplay for Spike Lee's 2008 film of Miracle at St. Anna.
“God is the color of water.”
Ruth McBride Jordan, answering her son, in The Color of Water, 1996. If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
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