Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize A Phenomenal Book Club Pick TIME • Best Books of the Month New York Times • Editors’ Choice Vulture • Most Anticipated Books 2022 Goodreads • Hot and Fresh: 60 Highly Anticipated Debut Novels Ms. Magazine • Most Anticipated Reads for the Rest of Us 2022 SheReads.com • Best Books Coming in Summer 2022 Essence • 18 New Books We Can’t Wait To Read This Summer An extraordinary debut novel shot through with remarkable nuance and tenderness, Big Girl traces the intergenerational hungers of the profoundly lovable Malaya Clondon. “Alive with delicious prose and the cacophony of ’90s Harlem, Big Girl gifts us a heroine carrying the weight of worn-out ideas, who dares to defy the compulsion to shrink, and in turn teaches us to pursue our fullest, most desirous selves without shame.” ―Janet Mock Malaya Clondon hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings in the church’s stuffy basement community center. A quietly inquisitive eight-year-old struggling to suppress her insatiable longing, she would much rather paint alone in her bedroom, or sneak out with her father for a sampling of Harlem’s forbidden street foods. For Malaya, the pressures of going to a predominantly white Upper East Side prep school are compounded by the high expectations passed down over generations from her sharp-tongued grandmother and her mother, Nyela, a painfully proper professor struggling to earn tenure at a prestigious university. But their relentless prescriptions―fad diets of cottage-cheese and sugar-free Jell-O, high-cardio African dance classes, endless doctors’ appointments―don’t work on Malaya. As Malaya comes of age in a rapidly gentrifying 1990s Harlem, she strains to understand “ladyness” and fit neatly within the suffocating confines of a so-called “femininity” that holds no room for her body. She finds solace in the lyrical riffs of Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah, and in the support of her sensitive father, Percy; still, tensions at home mount as rapidly as Malaya’s weight. Nothing seems to help―until a family tragedy forces her to finally face the source of her hunger on her own terms. Exquisitely compassionate and clever, Big Girl is “filled with everyday people who, in Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s gifted hands, show us the love and struggle of what it means to be inside bodies that don’t always fit with the outside world” (Jacqueline Woodson). In tracing the perils and pleasures of the inheritance that comes with being born, Sullivan pushes boundaries and creates an unforgettable portrait of Black womanhood in America. "In Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s achingly beautiful coming-of-age debut novel, Big Girl , this body carries the weight of an entire neighborhood.... Big Girl triumphs as a love letter to the Black girls who are forced to enter womanhood too early ― and to a version of Harlem that no longer exists. In this novel, gentrification means a violent thinning of the true beauty of Black and immigrant cultures and tightknit communities that have been nearly erased in service of commercialism and whiteness." ― Cleyvis Natera, New York Times Book Review "Can something be both a love letter and a take-down? Big Girl is that: a love letter to 90s culture (shout-out to Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah) and a take-down of 90s culture (looking at you, Weight Watchers) . . . a coming-of-age story with a capacious lens. For readers interested in a sharp look at Black womanhood, 90s Harlem, and the toxicity of body shame, Big Girl is a sure bet." ― Electric Literature , "Favorite Novels of 2022" "Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s debut novel weaves Malaya’s joyful friendships and discovery of hip-hop with a measured look at the injuries and shame passed down through generations." ― Emma Alpern, Vulture "I loved Malaya because I love stories about girls pushing back against societal expectations. This novel is about so many things―gentrification, intergenerational trauma, Black womanhood, love in all forms―but it’s Sullivan’s heart-rending observations about her character’s sense of disconnect in her body that kept a lump in my throat." ― Laura Warrell, The Millions "[ Big Girl is] a painful, intimate, and ultimately celebratory book about one girl’s determination to claim space. What’s especially breathtaking is the way Sullivan writes about queerness as reprieve and refugee. It is through moments of queer love and desire that Malaya begins to imagine a life lived on her own terms." ― Laura Sackton, Book Riot "Bountiful and biting, Sullivan’s debut is a crucial meditation on indulgence, identity, and inheritance, a story for those whose desire for self-determination and bodily autonomy cannot be satiated by the rations of a rapacious world." ― Jordan Taliha McDonald, Vulture , “49 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2022" "Sullivan (the collection Blue Talk and Love ) charms in her stunning d
