Blood at the Root, by Ciahnan Darrell

College student Christopher Fairchild, the son of a white billionaire, disappears, and is next seen being savagely tortured in a video that surfaces online. When it comes to light that he planned the incident as a sacrifice of atonement for America’s racial sins, the news detonates a bomb that rips through a country already rife with demonstrations and social unrest.

Blood at the Root tracks the fallout from Fairchild’s video through a lush universe populated by drug dealers, priests, police officers, civilians, and a talking pretzel bag. With the city on the precipice of chaos, the lives and livelihoods of individuals come under threat, forcing them to go to extremes in the name of self-preservation. The novel explores the human capacity for endurance in a society haunted by the ghosts of George Floyd, Andrew Goodman, Clementa Pickney, Erik Salgado, Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, and so many others.

Humble in the face of the magnitude and complexity of the violence he confronts, Ciahnan Darrell questions rather than proclaims, conjuring images with a poetic intensity that renders Blood at the Root an incendiary and gripping novel of power, pain, fear, and triumph.