Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham

"Wondrous." JOHN IRVING, THE NEW YORK TIMES"The Blackest book I've read in years." PAUL BEATTY"An early contender for best title of the year." LITERARY HUBA humorous and heart-wrenching story of a transgender woman's re-entry into life on the outside after twenty years in incarceration told over one whirlwind Fourth of July weekend. When Carlotta Mercedes was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she'd grown up with. But not long after her conviction, she began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards.

Over twenty years later, Carlotta is granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed Brooklyn, where she struggles to reconcile with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup. Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Joyce's Ulysses does through Dublin. Hannaham introduces a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a society and prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.

"Hannaham's prose is gloriously dense and full of elegant observations." ROXANNE GAY