Sugar is the story of two broken but otherwise very different women and the healing friendship that transpires between them. Bernice McFadden is a brilliant writer who can tell a terrific story! What a story! Poignant and raw, sweet and tender. Many thanks to the publisher for the book. and packing an unforgettable punch that left me reeling.

This is a intensely compulsive read, beautifully written, with twists and turns, of race, hate, murder, secrets, shame, and the power of friendship. McFadden gives us strong, independent women, skilfully developing their characters to great effect and the world of pain and suffering that life had dealt them. Pearl sees Jude in Sugar, both have gaping needs that somehow they fulfil in each other, finding the strength to come to terms with their haunting and tragic history. Sugar's harrowing and horrifying past is revealed in this riveting, emotionally hearbreaking novel, abandoned, never having experienced a childhood, deprived of love, the humiliations and the abuse.

The sanctimonious Christian women do not see as one of them, judging and fearing her without knowing her, wanting her gone, but Sugar's presence is going to have a long lasting impact on the town. Set in Arkansas, in the small town of Bigelow, a place seething with gossip, ignorance and judgementalism, Sugar arrives with hopes of starting afresh, but the townsfolk are far from welcoming of this newcomer, whom they regard with suspicion. Bernice L McFadden's powerful classic multilayered southern American novel evokes the 1950s era with vibrancy and colour, and details the surprising friendship that springs up between neighbours, sex worker, Sugar Lacey, with her in your face attitude, and the still grieving Pearl Taylor, married to Joe, who has never got over the loss of her daughter, Jude, brutally raped and killed, her body discarded by the road 15 years ago, a devastating crime that never saw any form of justice.

Sugar mcfadden