Miracle at St. Anna [Paperback]

From theNew York Timesbestselling author ofThe Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction,Five-Carat Soul, andKill 'Em and Leave, a James Brown biography.

James McBride’s powerful memoir,The Color of Water, was a groundbreaking literary phenomenon that transcended racial and religious boundaries, garnering unprecedented acclaim and topping bestseller lists for more than two years. Now McBride turns his extraordinary gift for storytelling to fiction—in a universal tale of courage and redemption inspired by a little-known historic event. InMiracle at St. Anna, toward the end of World War II, four Buffalo Soldiers from the Army’s Negro 92nd Division find themselves separated from their unit and behind enemy lines. Risking their lives for a country in which they are treated with less respect than the enemy they are fighting, they discover humanity in the small Tuscan village of St. Anna di Stazzema—in the peasants who shelter them, in the unspoken affection of an orphaned child, in a newfound faith in fellow man. And even in the face of unspeakable tragedy, they—and we—learn to see the small miracles of life.

This acclaimed novel is now a major motion picture directed by Spike Lee.“McBride creates an intricate mosaic of narratives that ultimately becomes about betrayal and the complex moral landscape of war.”—The New York Times Book Review

Full of miracles of friendship, of salvation and survival. —Los Angeles Times

“Searingly, soaringly beautiful…The book’s central theme, its essence, is a celebration of the human capacity for love”—The Baltimore Sun

“McBride is adept at describing the wartime state of mind: land and people lying ravaged in the wake of a wild brutality…The author is alóå