First published 2026
In 1936, a baby named Nannie speaks her first strange words: "Pa, no go. Him burn." The prediction comes true. From that moment, Nannie carries the ability to see death before it arrives, and the weight of that gift warps everything around her, including the family she raises in Texas. Forty years later, her son Chuck is expecting a child of his own. He wants to build something different from what he came from: a home with real love in it, steady and present. To do that, he feels he needs answers, so he starts visiting Nannie, the mother he has kept at a distance for years. But Nannie does not welcome him back. She pushes him away, harder the closer he gets. The book spans four generations, moving across Texas, tracing what gets passed down and what gets buried. Chuck stands at the center, caught between the future he is trying to build and the past that keeps asserting its claim on him. LaToya Watkins, a National Book Award nominee, asks what a person owes their children when they are still paying off a debt to their parents.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotionally-complex, haunting, introspective, lyrical, melancholic
Tropes: cyclical-trauma, estranged-family-reunion, generational-curse, inherited-burden
Setting: Texas
Period: 1936, 1970s, 20th-century
320 pages · Hardcover · Tiny Reparations Books
Content warnings: death, emotional-abuse