The Yellow House

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

''A major book that I suspect will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade'' New York Times Book Review

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom''s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah''s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah''s birth, the house would become Ivory Mae''s thirteenth and most unruly child.

A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom''s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America''s most mythologized ci