Good Morning America has selected Cherie Jones’ debut novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, for its latest book club pick.
Jones’ book follows a Barbadian woman whose husband shoots and kills a man in a botched robbery. A reviewer for Kirkus called the novel “a compelling and terribly sad story of lives defined by trauma generation after generation.”
“How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is the rare debut that immediately demonstrates a profound mastery of language and an infectious compassion for its characters,” GMA said in a news release. “At once a thrilling literary mystery and an intimate and visceral portrayal of interconnected lives, this is without a doubt the novel of 2021 and one you won’t want to miss.”
In a January interview with NPR, Jones said that her training as an attorney helped her write her novel.
“[W]hen I’m crafting this story, what I’m doing generally is asking lots of questions,” she said. “So I want to find out what the motivation for a particular action is. Why would they have made this or that choice? And I think that really comes from my legal training.”
The GMA book club was launched in 2019. Previous selections have included Bryan Washington’s Memorial and Ashley Audrain’s The Push.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
