Greetings Family and welcome new subscribers!
Please join me in celebrating the release of Ore Agbaje-Williams’s scandalous debut novel, The Three of Us. You will be able to see us in virtual conversation about it via:
Book Passage
Thursday, June 1, 2023
2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT
LINK: https://www.bookpassage.com/event/ore-agbaje-williams-robert-jones-jr-three-us-online-event
What’s The Three of Us About?
Long-standing tensions between a husband, his wife, and her best friend finally come to a breaking point in this sharp domestic comedy of manners, told brilliantly over the course of one day.
What if your two favorite people hated each other with a passion?
The wife has it all. A big house in a nice neighborhood, a ride-or-die snarky best friend, Temi, with whom to laugh about facile men, and a devoted husband who loves her above all else—even his distaste for Temi.
On a seemingly normal day, Temi comes over to spend a lazy afternoon with the wife: drinking wine, eating snacks, and laughing caustically about the husband’s shortcomings. But when the husband comes home and a series of confessions are made, the wife’s two confidantes are suddenly forced to jockey for their positions, throwing everyone’s integrity into question—and their long-drawn-out territorial dance, carefully constructed over years, into utter chaos.
Told in three taut, mesmerizing parts—the wife, the husband, the best friend—over the course of one day, The Three of Us is a subversively comical, wildly astute, and painfully compulsive triptych of domestic life that explores cultural truths, what it means to defy them, and the fine line between compromise and betrayal when it comes to ourselves and the people we’re meant to love.
Ore Agbaje-Williams is a British Nigerian writer and book editor from London. The Three of Us is her first novel.
Here’s what I had to say about it:
“The Three of Us is explosive. . . . What rocked me was the naked examination of that coveted construct we call innocence. . . . How easily it’s weaponized and made indistinguishable from guilt; and how the people who are honest about this are the only ones with a real chance at wellness and wholeness. The Three of Us read, wrote, and erased me. Then, it gave me back to myself, giggling and nodding my head. What a keen mind this story comes from. What a calm power this story holds.”
We hope to see you on June 1!
Bonus: Other Books You Should Buy ‘Cause They Fly
One of the bases of this newsletter is literature. And in a time of widespread book banning, I couldn’t let you go without recommending three books that I think you should add to your personal libraries:
The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar by Robin R. Means Coleman PhD and Mark H. Harris. “A definitive and surprising exploration of the history of Black horror films, after the rising success of Get Out, Candyman, and Lovecraft Country from creators behind the acclaimed documentary, Horror Noire.”
Fat Off, Fat On: A Big Bitch Manifesto by Clarkisha Kent. “In this disarming and candid memoir, cultural critic Clarkisha Kent unpacks the kind of compounded problems you face when you’re a fat, Black, queer woman in a society obsessed with heteronormativity.”
Innards by Magogodi oaMphela Makhene. “This incendiary debut of linked stories narrates the everyday lives of Soweto residents, from the early years of apartheid to its dissolution and beyond.”
Blessings upon blessings,
Robert