The Breaks
Julietta Singh
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From the publisher
Learning to mother at the end of the world is an infinite toggle between wanting to make you feel safe and needing you to know that the earth and its inhabitants are facing a catastrophic crisis.
In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh writes toward a tender vision of the world, offering children’s radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. In order to survive looming political and ecological disasters, Singh urges, we must break from the conventions we have inherited and begin to orient ourselves toward more equitable and revolutionary paths.
The Breaks celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girlhood, complicating the stark binaries that shape contemporary US discourse. With nuance and generosity, Singh reveals the connections among the crises humanity faces – climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism – inviting us to move through the breaks toward a tenable future.
‘This is a stunning work.’ – Publishers Weekly
‘The Breaks is amazing – I read the whole thing through in one sitting. It’s got the heft and staying power of Baldwin’s A Letter to My Nephew.’ – Prof. Lauren Berlant
‘A remarkable book.’ – Roma Tearne, author of Brixton Beach
‘A lens-shifting book… With poignant, aching, beautiful and deeply loving prose, Singh brings Brown girls into the sun, and makes you want to change the ways of the world for our young people and for us all.’ – Imani Perry
‘If a book can be a hole cut in the side of an existence, in order to escape it . . . then this is that book.’ – Bhanu Kapil