The House of Broken Bricks

November 1, 2023

Williams's debut, set in the English countryside, features the stories of four family members, told through their alternating perspectives. There's Tess, who longs for London; Richard, who uprooted the family for a farming life; and their 10-year-old twins, one presenting as Black, the other white. This story of belonging and identity won the Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award. Prepub Alert.

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February 12, 2024
Williams’s lyrical and haunting debut delves into the troubles faced by a mixed-race family in the English countryside. Tess and Richard’s marriage is on the rocks, largely because Tess, who is Black and grew up in a Jamaican section of London, doesn’t feel accepted in the couple’s largely white agricultural community, and Richard, a farmer, is at a loss for how to support her. Their fraternal twin boys, Max and Sonny, are also struggling. Tess is often viewed with suspicion when she’s with the lighter-skinned Max (one chilling scene involves a librarian forcing Tess to prove her identity before allowing her to leave with Max), while the darker-skinned Sonny is given racist nicknames by his primary school classmates. Around the novel’s halfway point, Tess makes tentative plans to return to London with Sonny (her “mini-me”). In a twist that recasts much of the preceding narrative in a new light, her plans are disrupted by a tragic accident. The event is heavily foreshadowed and not particularly surprising, but its effect on the family is palpable. Williams skillfully juggles the perspectives of her four main characters to reveal their impressions of one another (Richard views Tess’s anger as a “harsh whip”) and evoke the pastoral landscape (Sonny finds the air “full of liquid skylark song”). Readers will be moved.

March 1, 2024
Williams' first novel, set in rural England and narrated from four perspectives, is an imaginative exploration of interior and exterior space. Williams uses a simple structure and short chapters to create a gripping novel of complex themes about a multiracial family. Londoner mom Tess is of Jamaican descent. Local farmer and dad Richard is white. They have twin boys, Max and Sonny; one looks black, the other white. They all grapple with the way the world reacts to them and with how they feel about their sense of belonging or not within the family and the world outside. Descriptive passages of seasonal changes and the landscape, shaped by immersive attention to detail, form a fascinating framework for the changing emotional terrain of each family member. Williams balances sharp storytelling with empathetic emotional depth in the way she centralizes characters while maintaining the plot's pace and impact. This is a tale that boldly reaffirms the particulars of each human being while capturing the universal struggles families go through in coping with doubt, dislocation, grief, and isolation.

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Starred review from February 15, 2024
Something heavy hangs over members of the Hembry family as they navigate their individual griefs. Tess and Richard are fighting. "I don't know what's worse, them fighting or them being silent," their son Sonny thinks. His twin, Max, feels the cracks forming in their family as well. The twins' differing skin colors are a source of speculation in their small English town. Sonny takes after his mother, who has "brown skin, shiny brown like a conker," and Max takes after his dad, "pale and peaky." And though they're twins, they're treated differently by outsiders. Tess and Sonny endure microaggressions, and Sonny intuits that when his mother is "not thinking about London, she's dreaming about owning a house in Jamaica." In addition, there's an unnamed something hanging over the Hembrys' heads and causing pain. The chapters alternate among the perspectives of each family member, some in first person and some in a close third, exploring the ways each character views their household and the larger landscape of the town. Williams' elegant prose is enriched by vivid descriptions such as this, from Sonny: "I dream about house bricks glowing tangerine orange in the evening sunlight. Over in Hector's field, the hawthorns are covered in dark red berries....In the grass, acorns shine like wet gems." Williams delays the revelation of what's caused the rift in the family, skillfully using foreshadowing to keep the reader invested: "'We can't keep pretending this is normal, ' [Richard] continues evenly, his gaze fixed on his own face--gaunt, almost ghostly, so pale, with dark shadows weighing down his eyes. The last fourteen months have aged him ten years." There are many more hints like this woven into the narrative for readers to pick up and begin seeing the full picture. The chapters are divided into sections called Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer, which mirror the household's moods. Whether or not the family will stay together depends on the changing seasons. A subtle, complex, and gorgeously written delight.

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