A modern classic-bold, intimate, and unapologetically honest.
In REACHING BACK, award-winning author Nea Anna Simone introduces readers to Mignon Samuels and begins a powerful multigenerational saga that explores identity, inheritance, and the enduring strength of Black womanhood. This first novel in the Mignon Samuels Trilogy lays the emotional and narrative foundation for a story that unfolds across three books, tracing legacy, reckoning, and transformation.
When Mignon Samuels discovers an aging leather-bound journal, she is drawn into the hidden lives of four generations of women who came before her-from her great-grandmother's resilience to her mother's unspoken sacrifices. As the journal reveals long-buried truths, Mignon begins to see how patterns of silence, survival, and compromise have shaped her own life.
At the same time, Mignon is confronting the unraveling of her marriage and the collapse of the life she believed she was meant to live. Pulled between who she has been and who she is becoming, she must face difficult truths about love, loyalty, and self-belonging. What begins as discovery becomes a reckoning-one that forces Mignon to question inherited expectations and consider the cost of breaking generational cycles.
REACHING BACK is a fast-paced, emotionally rich novel about memory, identity, and the power of truth. Nea Anna Simone's prose is lyrical, raw, and deeply human, setting the stage for Mignon's continued journey in Reborn (Book Two) and The Substance of Things (Book Three).
Ideal for readers of Terry McMillan, J. California Cooper, and Tayari Jones, REACHING BACK asks an enduring question: how much of the past do we carry-and what does it take to choose ourselves?
