Leaving Atlanta

Leaving Atlanta (2002) is Tayari Jones’s debut work of fiction. Leaving Atlanta received the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s award for Debut Fiction, and Atlanta Magazine named it “Novel of the Year.” It also earned rave reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and from indigenous American writer, Leslie Marmon Silko. Jones, an Atlanta native, went on to publish three more novels, culminating in her best-known and most praised work, An American Marriage (2018). For the latter, Jones won the 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction.

Plot Summary

In the summer of 1979, a spate of unsolved child murders terrorized the African American residents of Atlanta. Three children—Tasha Baxter, Rodney Green, and Octavia Fuller—are fifth-grade classmates at Oglethorpe Elementary School, navigating the confusions of prepubescence while also living with the persistent fear that the kidnapper might murder one of them next. 

Tasha Baxter witnesses her parents’ unraveling marriage and their reconciliation—prompted by her father’s fear over his daughters’ safety. Terror comes close, however, after Tasha’s friend and crush Jashante Hamilton ends up missing—a trauma that causes his mother, Miss Viola, to go mad. Tasha’s classmate, Rodney Green, whom she thinks is the strangest boy in her class, feels unloved at home.