THURSTON NEALE
The debut novel from Thurston Neale
Hold
My
Hand
Where black and white draw the line between will and won't, do and don't, love has no fear to cross.
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop & Books A Million
THURSTON NEALE
Where black and white draw the line between will and won't, do and don't, love has no fear to cross.
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop & Books A Million
The Story
The line between servants and the served is distinctly drawn, in a town founded by the Klan's first Grand Wizard, where hooded customs make strange fruit of strange love. Jeanette Bailey knows this. Lionel Pettibone knows it, too. It's 1946, in the Deep South, and they're in deep trouble.
Civil blood stains civil hands. Bigotry bargains their fate. Hate-born curses, old-spirit prophecies, liquor-spiked betrayals, and soul-stripping wrongs total their sorrows in tears and deaths.
Secret messages keep their hopes aflame, lighting a path for their deliverance. Uncommon people and unexpected events merge to show them the way. With lives set by birthrights and burdens, their devotion must determine if they will ever be free to love.
Tap a medallion to read from the novel
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop & Books A Million
Experience the soundtrack that shaped so much of the backdrop for the book
About the Author
Thurston Neale writes to remember the people whom history often chronicles with the ink of moral amnesia. He further shows that more than trauma and atrocity are epigenetic. Hope, yearning, perseverance, conviction, and love are likewise passed on through the inheritance of our spiritual DNA. Neale believes the benevolence in our souls more than the malevolence in our motivations determines our survival; that the essentiality of good is our greatest evolutionary trait.
Praise for Hold My Hand
“Hold My Hand is brave enough to expose and reveal the full range of being human. It weaves words with a mastery and a lyricism that made me take notes every time I opened the book. It’s a torchbearer for authors like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker.”
South B.
Verified Reviewer
“This is one hell of a book!! Very cinematic, very realistic. It will hit you and hug you at the same time. Get your tissues, your snacks, your blanket, your glass of whatever and turn off your phone… Ava, Shonda, Ryan, somebody needs to hurry and snatch this up!”
Lost In A Book, Chicago
Verified Purchase · Amazon
“I imagine that Thurston Neale sits in a comfy chair in a quiet room late at night listening to jazz from the ’40s. And just like Sadie he has lines on his face that connect the decades… You have to have lived those words before you can write them… That’s how and why he was able to write this masterpiece.”
Lucky Loveless, Harlem, NY
Verified Reviewer · Sweepstakes entry
“Who is this Thurston Neale? Why haven’t we heard of him before? … There’s some otherworldly storytelling going on here! Mr. Neale has brought us a book from another dimension with some plots and characters and scenes that will send you into orbit.”
Amelias F.
Reader Review
“I don’t state this lightly. If you loved novels like Their Eyes Were Watching God Ours The Color Purple, Song of Solomon, Kin, and James , then download, buy or go to the library for Hold My Hand… It is a page-turner – all 800 pages.”
D Rios, NYC
Verified Reviewer · Sweepstakes entry
“You could read this book from front to back and in reverse. Everything is connected, from the details on the cover to the short poems at the beginning of each chapter… I predict Geraldine, Sadie and Amelia will be characters people will forever remember. My only regret is that it didn’t go on for another 800 pages.”
DC
Verified Reviewer
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop & Books A Million
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“The birds hopped closer toward Sadie, lining up three across when she appeared. Only twenty feet away, they stood like cast-iron statues, trading stares with her for a slow, deliberate minute.”
“Lionel looked into the doll’s eyes like he was gazing into the eyes of his child… He heard a coo, felt a squirm, and saw an infant smile.”
“Adelaide wanted nothing more than to be a butterfly… She believed… they would lift her from the ground, carry her away and put her in a cocoon. Then she could be born again…”
“…she retrieved a Reynolds Rocket ballpoint pen… It was the first time she ever held anything to write with that wasn’t a piece of chalk, a crayon, or a pencil.”
