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Critically Recognized
  • The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara book cover
  • The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara book cover
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The Salt Eaters

by Toni Cade Bambara

Healing and community in a Southern city

$17.92 USD
$29.87 USD $17.92 USD
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Awards & Recognition

  • Editorial selection

    Selected as one of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

    Included in The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years.

  • Critical praise

    Praised by the Los Angeles Times as “hard-nosed, wise, funny”

    The novel is described as “hard-nosed, wise, funny.”

AlbakiReads Editorial

Healing and community in a Southern city

Set in a fictional city in the American South, the novel brings together a community of Black faith healers around an event that affects their lives. Its focus on the healing properties of salt opens onto questions of physical, spiritual, and mental well-being, while the description also points to contrasting states of fear, courage, and balance within the community. The book’s setting and subject matter connect personal distress with wider responsibilities of care, presenting healing as both an individual concern and a shared one.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in fiction centered on Black communities and faith healing.
  • Readers drawn to stories that explore care, well-being, and communal responsibility.
  • Readers seeking literary fiction set in the American South.

Themes

Faith healingCommunity and carePhysical, spiritual, and mental well-beingDespair and responsibility

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

A community of Black faith healers witness an event that will change their lives forever in this "hard-nosed, wise, funny" novel (Los Angeles Times).

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Set in a fictional city in the American South, the novel also "inhabits the nonlinear, sacred space and sacred time of traditional African religion" (The New York Times Book Review).

Though they all united in their search for the healing properties of salt, some of them are centered, some are off-balance; some are frightened, and some are daring. From the men who live off welfare women to the mud mothers who carry their children in their hides, the novel brilliantly explores the narcissistic aspect of despair and the tremendous responsibility that comes with physical, spiritual, and mental well-being.
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