In 2013, after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, 14-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 disappeared. Before leaving, City is given a strange book called Long Division, which is set in 1985. This version of City travels into the future, and steals a laptop and cell phone from an orphaned teenage rapper called Baize Shephard. They take these items with them to 1964 to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan. City’s two stories converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance.

In HEAVY, Kiese Laymon writes about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this country actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.