"What’s Mine and Yours" by Naima Coster

I spotted Naima Coster’s first novel “Halsey Street” on a dreary winter afternoon several years ago in my local library. I’d dropped off a stack of books to donate and was idly perusing the new fiction that was being featured.

The book, with it’s red-doored cover, glowed with possibility. And it delivered. Put it on your must-read list, but I’m also here to evangelize for Coster’s new novel, “What’s Mine and Yours.”

The story is centered in a city in the Piedmont of North Carolina where two women — the men who loved them lost to violence and addiction — will raise their children with sacrifice and compromises, love and regrets.

And yet these women will find themselves on opposite sides of a divisive debate over racial integration at the local high school.

That would be weighty enough, but Coster follows the son and daughters of these women into adulthood as they move south and west, carrying the emotional scars of their childhoods, reckoning with the baggage of their choices.

And this is why I bring you Naima Coster’s novels as must-reads: Her effortless layering of guilt, remorse, ambition, self-awareness, love and loss makes these characters so real and painfully human.

So, put her first novel “Halsey Street” on your library list. And put in a pre-order right now for “What’s Mine and Yours.”

Then, join me for my video interview of Naima Coster for our special winter season of Talking Volumes, coming in March.