From the bestselling author of THE TWELVE TRIBES OF HATTIE, a searing multi-generational novel --- set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama --- about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival.

Two bold, utopic communities are at the heart of Ayana Mathis’ searing follow-up to her bestselling debut, THE TWELVE TRIBES OF HATTIE.

Bonaparte, Alabama --- once 10,000 glorious Black-owned acres – is now a ghost town vanishing to depopulation, crooked developers and an eerie mist closing in on its shoreline. Dutchess Carson, Bonaparte's fiery, tough-talking protector, fights to keep its remaining 1,000 acres in the hands of the last five residents. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, her estranged daughter, Ava, is drawn into Ark --- a seductive, radical group with a commitment to Black self-determination in the spirit of the Black Panthers and MOVE, with a dash of the Weather Underground’s violent zeal. Ava’s 11-year-old son, Toussaint, wants out. His future awaits him on his grandmother’s land, where the sounds of cicada and frog song might save him if only he can make it there. 
 
In Mathis’ electrifying novel, Bonaparte is both mythic landscape and spiritual inheritance, and 1980s Philadelphia is its raw, darkly glittering counterpoint. THE UNSETTLED is a spellbinding portrait of two fierce women reckoning with the steep cost of resistance: What legacy will we leave our children? Where can we be free?