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by Katherine Seligman
The Winner of the 2019 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, At the Edge of the Haight follows Maddy Donaldo, who is homeless at twenty, and the lives of those who depend on makeshift homes and communities in a rapidly changing San Francisco.
Maddy Donaldo, homeless at twenty, has made a family of sorts in the dangerous spaces of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. She knows whom to trust, where to eat, when to move locations, and how to take care of her dog. It's the only home she has. When she unwittingly witnesses the murder of a young homeless boy and is seen by the perpetrator, her relatively stable life is upended. Suddenly, everyone from the police to the dead boys' parents want to talk to Maddy about what she saw. As adults pressure her to give up her secrets and reunite with her own family before she meets a similar fate, Maddy must decide whether she wants to stay lost or be found. Against the backdrop of a radically changing San Francisco, a city which embraces a booming tech economy while struggling to maintain its culture of tolerance, At the Edge of the Haight follows the lives of those who depend on makeshift homes and communities.
As judge Hillary Jordan says, "This book pulled me deep into a world I knew little about, bringing the struggles of its young, homeless inhabitants—the kind of people we avoid eye contact with on the street—to vivid, poignant life. The novel demands that you take a close look. If you knew, could you still ignore, fear, or condemn them? And knowing, how can you ever forget?"
PEN/Bellwether Prize, 2019
"Seligman's portrayal of life as a homeless young person is immersive, but ultimately too sentimental." - Publishers Weekly
"All told, Seligman is to be commended for an insightful portrayal of homelessness. She's at her best when showing just how tenuous life on the streets can be...Brave but scattershot storytelling." - Kirkus Reviews
"Putting a human face on those who live at society's margins, At the Edge of the Haight is an intimate novel whose young characters struggle for survival and a little bit of dignity." - Foreword Reviews
"What a read this is, right from its startling opening scene. But even more than plot, it's the richly layered details that drive home a lightning bolt of empathy. To read At the Edge of the Haight is to live inside the everyday terror and longings of a world that most of us manage not to see, even if we walk past it on sidewalks every day. At a time when more Americans than ever find themselves at the edge of homelessness, this book couldn't be more timely." - Barbara Kingsolver, author of Unsheltered and The Poisonwood Bible
"At the Edge of the Haight brims with empathy for the overlooked and the underserved. It's a deep, dark, and necessary look into lives often discarded and disregarded—an urgent and important read and a startling debut." - Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women
"Subtle yet compelling ... written in delicate, understated prose, At the Edge of the Haight not only offers unexpected insights into the daily life of those who are young and on the streets, but into the confusion of tenderness, hurt, fear and fierceness that tumble within the minds of many. An enlightening read for anyone of any age." - Helen Benedict, author of Wolf Season
"This book pulled me deep into a world I knew little about, bringing the struggles of its young, homeless inhabitants—the kind of people we avoid eye contact with on the street—to vivid, poignant life. The novel demands that you take a close look. If you knew, could you still ignore, fear or condemn them? And knowing, how can you ever forget?" - Hillary Jordan, author of Mudbound
"I loved this novel: its tenderness, its toughness, its brilliantly-named protagonist Maddy—these days, what thoughtful person isn't mad? Maddy is a Holden Caulfield for our times, smart, streetwise, a survivor who is not jaded. Seligman's vivid portrait leads us to understand San Francisco's street people not as "the other" but as extensions of our friends, our families, our neighbors, ourselves. If there is hope for our species, it begins there." - Fenton Johnson, author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life
This information about At the Edge of the Haight was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Katherine Seligman is a journalist and author who lives in San Francisco. She has been a writer at the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner and a correspondent at USA Today. Her work has appeared in Redbook, Life, Money, California Magazine, the anthology Fresh Takes and elsewhere.
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