About This Book
The Snowdon family is the envy of Black D.C.: educated, wealthy, and accomplished. John Christopher, the patriarch, saves lives as a heart surgeon and is revered by his students at Howard University. His wife, Camille, manages an elegant house overlooking Rock Creek Park, in the neighborhood known as the Gold Coast. Here she devotes herself to reading, gardening, and raising their three daughters—Cynthia, Patricia, and Eva—who will attend the very best schools and are able to roam the world on a whim.
Theirs ought to be a story of success and empowerment, but something is rotten in the house of Snowdon. Years later, when John Christopher's granddaughter Johnnie comes to seek the truth about her own parentage, she uncovers family secrets that reflect America's original sin and look forward to an apocalyptic future.
By turns a poetic epic, a ghost story, a historical novel, and a chilling dystopian fable, Thereafter Johnnie is a unique and uniquely American fusion of myth and hard-bitten reality: an erotic, horrifying, and even hopeful reckoning with hundreds of years of injustice.
