Great Black Hope Audiobook By Rob Franklin cover art

Great Black Hope

A Novel

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Great Black Hope

By: Rob Franklin
Narrated by: Justice Smith, Rob Franklin
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“You’re going to get papercuts, you’re going to turn the pages so fast.” —Brad Thor, Today

“If Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, and Margo Jefferson somehow collaborated, this might have been the delightful result.” —Boris Kachka, The Atlantic

“Incandescent…full of sentences I want to cut out and glue to my forehead.” —Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!

“A masterpiece…At once fresh and original while delighting the reader with hints of Franzen, McInerny, Baldwin. This novel—a whodunit, a coming-of-age, a New York novel—heralds the arrival of a rarefied talent.” —Elin Hilderbrand, bestselling author of Swan Song

A gripping, elegant debut novel about a young Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamour and tragedy, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest, from an electrifying new voice.

An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not.

It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, the daughter of a famous soul singer, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as lingering questions around how well he really knew his closest friend. He flees to his hometown of Atlanta, only to buckle under the weight of expectations from his family of doctors and lawyers and their history in America. But when Smith returns to New York, it’s not long before he begins to lose himself to his old life—drawn back into the city’s underworld, where his search for answers may end up costing him his freedom and his future.

Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta’s Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiraling downward, and how to find a way back to hope.©2025 Rob Franklin (P)2025 Simon & Schuster Audio African American City Life Genre Fiction Urban New York

Dear Listener,

Why did I choose this title for my debut novel?
"While I’ve always been ambiently aware of the phrase “great black hope,” it only took root in me as a potential book title after I read a 1995 Vanity Fair profile of Colin Powell. At the time, Powell was leaving a storied career in the military and entering politics, but since no one yet knew his party affiliation, they held up his background and identity markers (of race and class) as a cipher to try to understand him. As I began writing this novel about an upwardly mobile but downwardly spiraling Black gay twentysomething, I became interested in using this phrase (which has also been applied to everyone from Condoleezza Rice to Barack Obama) in a tongue-in-cheek way. It was only after I’d written a draft and began to seek feedback from others that I saw the title also has an earnest air, as our protagonist Smith—his illusions shattered and life razed to the ground—begins to find a way back to hope."– Rob Franklin, writer of Great Black Hope
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It was boring. Didn’t really have a plot. I didn’t get it. Narration was good. Just a bunch of rich kids doing rich kid things - who cares if they’re black.

Awful

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Touching story. Elegant prose. Fiercly honest. and somehow the story of Anerica,too. Franklin is something special!

awesomr

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