Short Synopsis
Kiese Laymon's debut novel is a Twain-esque exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in Post-Katrina Mississippi, written in a voice that's alternately funny, lacerating, and wise.

Full Synopsis
Long Division contains two interwoven stories. In the first, it's 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen "City" Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he's sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared.

Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book's main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985 City, along with his friend and love-object, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future and steals a laptop and cell phone from an orphaned teenage rapper called . . . Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet protect his family from the Klan.

City's two stories ultimately converge in the mysterious work shed behind his grandmother's, where he discovers the key to Baize's disappearance.

"Laymon's debut novel is an ambitious mix of contemporary southern gothic with Murakamiesque magical realism." ---Booklist

"[One of] our best books of the year so far . . . Layman's debut novel is bursting with colloquial language from three generations of Mississippi African Americans, mixed with gut-piercing truths about a long racial divide that persists to this day." ---Diane Colson, School Library Journal

"Crisden is as convincing in his performance as the youth than as the elderly grandmother, or the many other characters in the novel. His range extends from troubled inner-city youth to college-educated adult without missing a beat." ---AudioFile

Saroyan Prize for International Writing