The Temple of My Familiar -- Alice Walker

<p><strong>In this "brilliant" (<em>Essence</em>) sequel to <em>The Color Purple</em>, Alice Walker weaves an intricate, rich tapestry of interrelated lives. </strong></p><p><em>This edition includes a new Letter to the Reader by Alice Walker.</em></p><p>Celie and Shug from <em>The Color Purple</em> subtly shadow the lives of the dozens of astonishing characters in <em>The Temple of My Familiar</em>, all of whom are dealing in some way with the legacy of the African experience in America. From recent African immigrants to a woman who grew up in the mixed-race rainforest communities of South America to Celie's own granddaughter living in modern-day San Francisco, they must come to terms with the brutal stories of their ancestors in order to confront their own troubled lives.</p><p>Described by the author as "a romance of the last 500,000 years," <em>The Temple of My Familiar </em>creates a new mythology from old fables and history, and along with it a profoundly spiritual explanation for centuries of shared African American experience.</p><p><strong>"The richness of [this] novel is amazing, overwhelming. A hundred themes and subjects spin through it, dozens of characters, a whirl of time and places. None is touched superficially: all the people are passionate actors and sufferers, and everything they talk about is urgent, a matter truly of life and death. They're like Dostoyevsky's characters, relentlessly raising the great moral questions and pushing one another towards self