“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride (Riverhead Books)
“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” James McBride’s tour de force of a new novel, opens in 1972, when authorities discover a human skeleton and mezuzah at the bottom of a well in the small community of Pottstown in southeast Pennsylvania. Suspecting foul play, they question an old Jewish man who lives in the ramshackle neighborhood of Chicken Hill, where the town’s Jews, Blacks and immigrant whites once lived together in harmony.
