Genre Fiction
![Leila Mottley - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B09F6YK867.jpg)
Nightcrawling: A novel
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK • A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system. This debut of a blazingly original voice "bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole" (Tommy Orange, author of There There).
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, TIME, GOODREADS
Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison
But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent-which has more than doubled-and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed. One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.
Rich with raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, TIME, GOODREADS
Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison
But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent-which has more than doubled-and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed. One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.
Rich with raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.
Editorial Reviews
A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, TIME, GOODREADS
BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • A New York Times Writer to Watch • THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE NOMINEE • Lambda Literary Award Finalist
"Astonishing . . . Nightcrawling heralds a bold new voice in fiction." -Associated Press
"Mottley writes with a lyrical abandon." -New York Times Book Review
"Nightcrawling really is a powerful, poignant story worth your attention . . . Revelatory . . . My god-that voice. It's sometimes too painful to keep reading, but always too urgent to stop." -Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Dazzling and electrifying . . . A spellbinding story and a Catcher in the Rye for a new generation."
-Booker Prize Judges 2022
"I would sell my soul to read this book again for the first time."
-Jack Edwards, Booktok Influencer via TikTok @jackbenedwards
"A lyrical page-turner [by] that rare young phenom who isn't a product of privilege."
-Los Angeles Times, Gift Guide
"Nightcrawling bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole." -Tommy Orange, author of There There
"Unflinching . . . Essential to understanding how maddeningly elusive justice can be." -San Francisco Chronicle
"
BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • A New York Times Writer to Watch • THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE NOMINEE • Lambda Literary Award Finalist
"Astonishing . . . Nightcrawling heralds a bold new voice in fiction." -Associated Press
"Mottley writes with a lyrical abandon." -New York Times Book Review
"Nightcrawling really is a powerful, poignant story worth your attention . . . Revelatory . . . My god-that voice. It's sometimes too painful to keep reading, but always too urgent to stop." -Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Dazzling and electrifying . . . A spellbinding story and a Catcher in the Rye for a new generation."
-Booker Prize Judges 2022
"I would sell my soul to read this book again for the first time."
-Jack Edwards, Booktok Influencer via TikTok @jackbenedwards
"A lyrical page-turner [by] that rare young phenom who isn't a product of privilege."
-Los Angeles Times, Gift Guide
"Nightcrawling bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole." -Tommy Orange, author of There There
"Unflinching . . . Essential to understanding how maddeningly elusive justice can be." -San Francisco Chronicle
"
Readers Top Reviews
S. Tatum Mrs Sara
An insider view of street walking or turning tricks and how and why young women get involved.
Leia WilliamsS. T
I appreciated the storyline of this book, though it was hard to read knowing this has happened and will continue to happen. I also appreciated SOME of the poetic aspects of the author's writing style and all of the imagery, but it, at many times, became annoying. There was just an overly excessive use of figurative language (almost forced) that lost me and made it irritating to read. I am happy that I pushed through and completed the novel.
Sharitta HLeia Wi
This book was good from beginning to end. I read 4 chapters the first day. Can't believe the author was 16/17 when she wrote it. She's an amazing writer. Looking forward to her next book.
LDBSharitta HLeia
At the age of 17, our main character Kiara is on her own. Father dead, mother in jail, older brother refusing to take any real responsibility. Playing stand-in mother to a neighbor's kid, she carries the world on her shoulders as she tries to keep the apartment and survive. This is a story of desperation, of being pushed into a corner and how one bad decision can get you stuck in an untenable situation. Through her found family, Kiara finds a reason to keep going as well as (eventually) the support she needs to move on. "Nightcrawling" deals with so many issues -- poverty, abandonment, exploitation, racism, becoming an adult and resilience. No 17 year old should have all this on their shoulders. Mottley does an amazing job of creating a fully realized main character and showing how she navigates the situation and how she arrives at her decisions. This book is made even more interesting in retrospect knowing that it was inspired by a real case of police exploitation of a young black woman in Oakland, CA and the fact that Mottley, who is from Oakland, started writing this (her debut) novel when she was 16, with its publication when she was only 19. I look forward to reading more from this young woman who evidently is very talented.
Carey CalvertLDBS
Nightcrawling is a poetic screed, a nightmare turned lullaby that will submerge you in the same feces filled swimming pool that sits like a monument – “… the way the chlorine and feces have become part of the air, the natural scent of the apartment.” It is a testament to place and time. “None of us have ever set foot in the pool for as long as I been here,” says 17-year-old Kiara, who along with her brother, Marcus, attempt to survive in Oakland. Abandoned by their mother, who attempted to kill herself after neglecting her infant daughter; the infant later found dead in that very pool. Their father died years earlier. Repulsed? Heard this before? Well, keep reading. Nightcrawling is a contemplation of what it means to be vulnerable, unprotected, and unseen, says the author, the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate, Leila Mottley, whose work has been featured in the New York Times and Oprah Daily. Nightcrawling is a 2022 Oprah’s Book Club pick and has also recently (announced July 26, 2022) been long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize (the leading literary award in the English-speaking world), with 20-year Mottley, the youngest ever. Each sentence is a poem that wafts, delays, and immerses you in the mind of the novel’s heroine, Kiara. Nightcrawling exposes the trauma without becoming bogged down in it; at once, an element of hope amidst a seemingly endless string of roadblocks including family, long ago friends turned dizzying acquaintances, drugs, crime and prostitution. It is the familiar animus of our time. “Letting the streets have you is like planning your own funeral. Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun’s out.” Kiara has to pay the rent but no one, other than the occasional side job, will hire her. Her slightly older brother Marcus tries but is too caught up in his own ego and pride and more importantly, the abandonment he feels from not only his mother and father but his ostensibly well to do Uncle Ty, who lives in LA, and has had success in the rap game. A game Marcus wants to give his all but his all is too little to ward off the lure of the street to which he inevitably succumbs. To Kiara, “Street money's still money,” and what begins as a misunderstanding grants Kiara a sense of power. A power over men through the use of what she feels is the only thing she has left. “Only thing worse than a untamed man is a man on the edge of it.” In 2015, when Mottley was a young teenager in Oakland, a story broke describing how members of the Oakland Police Department, and several other police departments in the Bay Area, had participated in the sexual exploitation of a young woman and attempted to cover it up – author’s note. “I’m starting to think there is no such thing as a g...
Short Excerpt Teaser
The swimming pool is filled with dog shit and Dee's laughter mocks us at dawn. I've been telling her all week that she's looking like the crackhead she is, laughing at the same joke like it's gonna change. Dee didn't seem to mind that her boyfriend left her, didn't even seem to care when he showed up poolside after making his rounds to every dumpster in the neighborhood last Tuesday, finding feces wrapped up in plastic bags. We heard the splashes at three a.m., followed by his shouts about Dee's unfaithful ass. But mostly we heard Dee's cackles, reminding us how hard it is to sleep when you can't distinguish your own footsteps from your neighbor's.
None of us have ever set foot in the pool for as long as I've been here; maybe because Vernon, the landlord, has never once cleaned it, but mostly because nobody ever taught none of us how to delight in the water, how to swim without gasping for breath, how to love our hair when it is matted and chlorine-soaked. The idea of drowning doesn't bother me, though, since we're made of water anyway. It's kind of like your body overflowing with itself. I think I'd rather go that way than in some haze on the floor of a crusty apartment, my heart out-pumping itself and then stopping.
This morning is different. The way Dee's laugh swirls upward into a high-pitched sort of scream before it wanders into her bellow. When I open the door, she's standing there, by the railing, like always. Except today she faces toward the apartment door and the pool keeps her backlit so I can't see her face, can only see the way her cheekbones bob like apples in her hollow skin. I close the door before she sees me.
Some mornings I peek my head into Dee's unlocked door just to make sure she's still breathing, writhing in her sleep. In some ways I don't mind her neurotic laughing fits because they tell me she's alive, her lungs haven't quit on her yet. If Dee's still laughing, not everything has gone to shit.
The knock on our apartment is two fists, four pounds, and I should have known it was coming, but it still makes me jump back from the door. It ain't that I didn't see Vernon making his rounds or the flyer flipping up and drifting back into place on Dee's door as she stared at it, still cackling. I turn and look at my brother, Marcus, on the couch snoring, his nose squirming up to meet his brows.
He sleeps like a newborn, always making faces, his head tilting so I can see his profile, where the tattoo remains taut and smooth. Marcus has a tattoo of my fingerprint just below his left ear and, when he smiles, I find myself drawn right to it, like another eye. Not that either of us has been smiling lately, but the image of it-the memory of the freshly rippling ink below his grin-keeps me coming back to him. Keeps me hoping. Marcus's arms are lined in tattoos, but my fingerprint is the only one on his neck. He told me it was the most painful one he'd ever gotten.
He got the tattoo when I turned seventeen and it was the first day I ever thought he might just love me more than anything, more than his own skin. But now, three months from my eighteenth birthday, when I look at my quivering fingerprint on the edge of his jaw, I feel naked, known. If Marcus ended up bloodied in the street, it wouldn't take much to identify him by the traces of me on his body.
I reach for the doorknob, mumbling, "I got it," as if Marcus was ever actually gonna put feet to floor this early. On the other side of the wall, Dee's laughter seeps into my gums like salt water, absorbed right into the fleshy part of my mouth. I shake my head and turn back to the door, to my own slip of paper taped to the orange paint. You don't have to read one of these papers to know what they say. Everyone been getting them, tossing them into the road as if they can nah, nigga themselves out of the harshness of it. The font is unrelenting, numbers frozen on the flyer, lingering in the scent of industrial printer ink, where it was inevitably pulled from a pile of papers just as toxic and slanted as this one and placed on the door of the studio apartment that's been in my family for decades. We all known Vernon was a sellout, wasn't gonna keep this place any longer than he had to when the pockets are roaming around Oakland, looking for the next lot of us to scrape out from the city's insides.
The number itself wouldn't seem so daunting if Dee wasn't cracking herself up over it, curling into a whole fit, cementing each zero into the pit of my belly. I whip my head toward her, shout out over the wind and the morning trucks, "Quit laughing or go back inside, Dee. Shit." She turns her head an inch or two to stare at me and smiles wide, opens her mouth until it's a complete oval, and continues her cackle. I rip the rent increase n...
None of us have ever set foot in the pool for as long as I've been here; maybe because Vernon, the landlord, has never once cleaned it, but mostly because nobody ever taught none of us how to delight in the water, how to swim without gasping for breath, how to love our hair when it is matted and chlorine-soaked. The idea of drowning doesn't bother me, though, since we're made of water anyway. It's kind of like your body overflowing with itself. I think I'd rather go that way than in some haze on the floor of a crusty apartment, my heart out-pumping itself and then stopping.
This morning is different. The way Dee's laugh swirls upward into a high-pitched sort of scream before it wanders into her bellow. When I open the door, she's standing there, by the railing, like always. Except today she faces toward the apartment door and the pool keeps her backlit so I can't see her face, can only see the way her cheekbones bob like apples in her hollow skin. I close the door before she sees me.
Some mornings I peek my head into Dee's unlocked door just to make sure she's still breathing, writhing in her sleep. In some ways I don't mind her neurotic laughing fits because they tell me she's alive, her lungs haven't quit on her yet. If Dee's still laughing, not everything has gone to shit.
The knock on our apartment is two fists, four pounds, and I should have known it was coming, but it still makes me jump back from the door. It ain't that I didn't see Vernon making his rounds or the flyer flipping up and drifting back into place on Dee's door as she stared at it, still cackling. I turn and look at my brother, Marcus, on the couch snoring, his nose squirming up to meet his brows.
He sleeps like a newborn, always making faces, his head tilting so I can see his profile, where the tattoo remains taut and smooth. Marcus has a tattoo of my fingerprint just below his left ear and, when he smiles, I find myself drawn right to it, like another eye. Not that either of us has been smiling lately, but the image of it-the memory of the freshly rippling ink below his grin-keeps me coming back to him. Keeps me hoping. Marcus's arms are lined in tattoos, but my fingerprint is the only one on his neck. He told me it was the most painful one he'd ever gotten.
He got the tattoo when I turned seventeen and it was the first day I ever thought he might just love me more than anything, more than his own skin. But now, three months from my eighteenth birthday, when I look at my quivering fingerprint on the edge of his jaw, I feel naked, known. If Marcus ended up bloodied in the street, it wouldn't take much to identify him by the traces of me on his body.
I reach for the doorknob, mumbling, "I got it," as if Marcus was ever actually gonna put feet to floor this early. On the other side of the wall, Dee's laughter seeps into my gums like salt water, absorbed right into the fleshy part of my mouth. I shake my head and turn back to the door, to my own slip of paper taped to the orange paint. You don't have to read one of these papers to know what they say. Everyone been getting them, tossing them into the road as if they can nah, nigga themselves out of the harshness of it. The font is unrelenting, numbers frozen on the flyer, lingering in the scent of industrial printer ink, where it was inevitably pulled from a pile of papers just as toxic and slanted as this one and placed on the door of the studio apartment that's been in my family for decades. We all known Vernon was a sellout, wasn't gonna keep this place any longer than he had to when the pockets are roaming around Oakland, looking for the next lot of us to scrape out from the city's insides.
The number itself wouldn't seem so daunting if Dee wasn't cracking herself up over it, curling into a whole fit, cementing each zero into the pit of my belly. I whip my head toward her, shout out over the wind and the morning trucks, "Quit laughing or go back inside, Dee. Shit." She turns her head an inch or two to stare at me and smiles wide, opens her mouth until it's a complete oval, and continues her cackle. I rip the rent increase n...
