The Travelers - Hardcover

"Regina Porter’s sprawling, sparkling debut novel... is an exhilarating ride. Porter is a wickedly astute chronicler of human foibles. In her hands, this series of glimpses feels something like life itself." (Guardian)

"An astoundingly audacious debut." (Oprah Magazine)

"Spanning six decades and three continents...[The Travelers] is held together by an elegant web of connections... Porter has a striking habit of telescoping time to chart individual trajectories... The often breathtaking immediacy and assurance of Porter’s prose carries you through." (Daily Mail)

"If you’re looking for a poetic, spare, sometimes funny tale of ordinary people pining for meaningful connections ― or if you’re someone who wishes Raymond Carver had published a novel ― you have arrived." (New York Times)

"This kaleidoscopic debut novel... deftly skips back and forth through the decades, sometimes summarizing a life in a few paragraphs, sometimes spending pages on one conversation. As one character observes, "We move in circles in this life."" (New Yorker)

"[A] remarkable debut novel... There is a confidence to Porter's writing that makes it hard to believe that this is her first novel... The Travelers succeeds because Porter is so clear-eyed when documenting human interactions, the mass of particularities amounting to a gloriously and depressingly messy picture of life in America." (Literary Review)

"American history comes to vivid, engaging life in this tale of two interconnected families (one white, one black)... the complex, beautifully drawn characters are unique and indelible." (Entertainment Weekly)

"A sprawling, ambitious debut ... Beautifully written and intricately plotted." (Kirkus)

"An absolute wonder of a novel. A sweeping examination of race and class within America's troubled history. A love letter to fearless women laced with a sharp humour. I'm thrilled by the magnitude, ingenuity and heart of Regina Porter's daring vision." (Irenosen Okojie)

"In this innovative and deeply moving debut, Regina Porter has mastered the kind of alchemy found in a great painting by Poussin: her canvas is vast, her subject ambitious, and yet her execution is so brilliantly devoted to particulars that it creates a miraculous intimacy. The beauty of this book lies in how Porter's characters, through resilience and community, art and creative love, cut new doors out of the corners they've been backed into by history." (Garth Greenwell)

When the boy was four, he asked his father why people needed sleep. His father said, ‘So God could unfuck all the things people fuck up.’

As America recovers from the Second World War, two families’ journeys begin. James Vincent, born in 1942 to an Irish-American family, escapes his parents’ turbulent marriage and attends law school in New York, where he moves up the social ladder as a prosperous and bright attorney. Meanwhile, Agnes Miller, a beautiful black woman on date with a handsome suitor, is pulled over by the police on a rural road in Georgia. The terrible moments that follow make her question her future and pivot her into a hasty marriage and new life in the Bronx.

Illuminating more than six decades of sweeping change – from the struggle for civil rights and the chaos of Vietnam to Obama’s first year as President – James and Agnes’s families will come together in unexpected, intimate and profoundly human ways.

Romantic and defiant, humorous and intellectually daring, Regina Porter brilliantly explores how race, gender and class collide in modern-day America – and charts the mishaps and adventures we often take to get closer to ourselves and to home.