Fugitive Archives
My Family and the American Myth of Belonging
Contributors
Formats and Prices
- On Sale
- Oct 6, 2026
- Page Count
- 256 pages
- Publisher
- Algonquin Books
- ISBN-13
- 9781643753188
Price
$29.00Price
$39.00 CADFormat
Format:
- Hardcover $29.00 $39.00 CAD
- ebook $14.99 $19.99 CAD
- Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $24.99
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Raised by a working-class white mother with few choices and fewer protections, Asale Angel-Ajani and her twin—her only Black children—were quietly abandoned in their teenage years, left to navigate a country full of prejudice on their own. When her grandmother, the family’s record keeper, died, Angel-Ajani took up the archive, looking for answers—about her mother’s abandonment, her father’s struggles, her grandmother’s overt racism and later love story with her Black step-grandfather, and the many contradictions she witnessed growing up. Most urgently, she sought to understand her own inescapable anger.
Angel-Ajani uncovered a story she never expected to find. Branch by branch, she traced her family tree back to enslaved, Native, free, and white ancestors, revealing a history that America still refuses to confront: one about a nation not of strangers divided, but of lives intimately entangled across race and ethnicity. She threads this ordinary family’s lives through the larger national narrative, showing the connections deliberately erased from official accounts, how these shared bonds have been broken to create a false “us” and “them,” and why reckoning with this divide is urgent and unavoidable.
In an age marked by fractured realities, moral exhaustion, and rising exclusion, Fugitive Archives is a vital exploration of race and class—and a call to confront the truths of our past to shape a more just future.
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Praise for A Country You Can Leave:Publishers Weekly (starred review) "From page one, A Country You Can Leave is a riveting, exasperating, and deeply heartbreaking tale of mother-daughter strife and resilience. Asale Angel-Ajani is an explosive talent and her story of Afro-Cuban Lara coming of age in a ruthless headlock with her survivalist Russian mother, Yevgenia, will disintegrate your strong-held emotional walls, down to her very last act of resistance." —Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming
“A master class of a bildungsroman . . . Like childhood, Angel-Ajani’s novel is alternately horrifying and spellbinding in its lessons about love, family and growing up." I>The New York Times
"Angel-Ajani’s unflinching portrait of this hypernuclear family is captivating and complex, with a richly drawn supporting cast and occasional arch humor that leavens the intensely emotional backdrop." —Bookpage (starred review)
"[A] piercing debut novel . . . In perceptive prose and wry dialogue, Angel-Ajani brings to life a mother and daughter trapped by their circumstances. This is exemplary."
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