Pomegranate a novel by Helen Elaine Lee

Ranita Atwater is wrapping up her four-year sentence for opioid possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center, near Boston. With three years of sobriety, she is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children from her aunts who have been raising them. My name is Ranita, and I’m an addict, she has said again and again at NA meetings. But who else is she? Who might she choose to become?

She is gaining her freedom, but she is leaving behind the group of women who have helped to get her through. And she is losing her lover, Maxine, who has inspired her to imagine herself and the world differently.

Drawing on Maxine’s love, the solace of books, and the curiosity, respect, and wonder imparted by her people, Ranita is determined to confront the weight of the past and discover what might lie beyond mere survival. With her fierce and often funny voice, she reveals how rocky and winding the path to healing is for a Black woman.

She must steer clear of the temptation of oblivion. She must weather the resentment and mistrust of her children. She must atone. And she must face her unhealed wounds and honor the body that has seldom felt like it belongs to her. Will she be able to draw on family, memory, faith, and nature to keep choosing life? Will she discover abundance in her pomegranate heart, alongside all the loss?

With lyrical and masterful prose, Helen Elaine Lee paints a humane, unflinching, and hopeful por- trait of the devastating and interconnected effects of addiction, incarceration, racism, and misogyny . . . and of one woman’s determination to own and tell her story.

Praise for Pomegranate

“Helen Elaine Lee has brought such a deep and beautiful world of people to the page, I found myself already missing them even as I continued to read. In their survival, we find ours and are left grateful, different, better.”
–Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Red at the Bone 

“Helen Elaine Lee is working at the height of her powers. With empathy, insight, and hope, Pomegranate reveals the hidden heartbreak of the women touched by incarceration. Prepare to be challenged and changed.”
–Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage

“Helen Elaine Lee is a writer of great humanity, wisdom, delicacy and heart. Pomegranate is a moving portrait of a woman living with her mistakes and determined to do better. Ranita’s journey out of addiction and incarceration and early trauma, her daily struggle to live a life as large as her spirit, is a remarkable feat of literary conjuration. This is what novels are for. ”
 –Jennifer Haigh, nationally bestselling author of Mercy Street

Novel after novel, I have felt enduring admiration for Helen Lee’s meticulous gift of observation. Her stories have always arrived well before their time, and in an excavation of English that is both elegant and meticulous. Now, her much anticipated new novel, Pomegranate, is both lush and probing. This book is evidence, yet again, of Lee’s stunning gift to hold history and beauty in her hands simultaneously. Deeply elegant and brilliantly political, in Pomegranate Lee makes the bold choice to locate a valiant human drama within the unanticipated world of women in prison. Startling, illuminating, tender, this novel intersects at the crossroad of high art and unapologetic political excavation. What is a hero? What is a story? And who––if not these women, their histories––deserve our most ardent attention? This book is significant because it explodes the idea of what an American novel is or can be.  Pomegranate shows Lee at her very best––which is to say, writing with the astute courage for which she has been celebrated, engaging the world with rigor and devotion. ”
–Robin Coste Lewis, National Book Award-winning author of Voyage of the Sable Venus

“Pomegranate feels like something new: a humane, closely observed account of a Black woman—a recovering addict, a mother who’s lost custody of her children—emerging from prison, working to stay clean, reconnect with her family, and come to terms with her complicated past. This moving and panoramic novel starts off as a character study and evolves into a big-hearted story of redemption.”
–Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of Tracy Flick Can’t Win and Mrs. Fletcher

“Pomegranate is a fierce and extraordinarily moving epic about coming home. Helen Lee has blessed us with the great American novel about people America tosses away. Her searing words lift up the lives of women – daughters, mothers, and lovers – you think you know,​ but you have no idea. The achievement of a lifetime from a brilliant storyteller, this soulful novel is a balm, a truth telling, and a damn good read. Somewhere Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde are slurping fat juicy pomegranates and they are rejoicing.”
–Paul Butler, MSNBC Legal Analyst, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men