Daughter: A Novel

Daughter, a penetrating novel by Essence editor Asha Bandele and chosen by Black Issues Book Review as Best Urban Fiction for 2003, follows a young woman through life that changes in one night from a horrific incident with police brutality.

At nineteen, Aya is a promising Black college student from Brooklyn who is struggling through a difficult relationship with her emotionally distant mother, Miriam. One winter night, Aya is shot by a white police officer in a case of mistaken identity. Keeping vigil by her daughter’s hospital bed, Miriam remembers her own youth: her battle for independence from her parents, her affair with Aya’s father, and the challenges of raising her daughter. But as Miriam confronts her past--her losses and regrets--she begins to heal and discovers a tentative hopefulness.

Moving between past and present, the novel builds to a dramatic, heart-wrenching but ultimately redemptive conclusion. Daughter is a novel that appears to be about police brutality, but police brutality is only the landscape. The heart of the story is about the silence between generations--the secrets mothers keep from their children in an effort to protect them.

Asha Bandele served as features editor and writer for Essence magazine, and a Revson Fellow at Columbia University. She is the author of the memoir The Prisoner’s Wife and a collection of poetry. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her daughter.