Somebody’s Child
by Dennis A. Williams

Somebody’s Child is the searing and achingly poignant story of African American brothers and fathers, both a timeless and timely tale of love and alienation. Quincy Crawford and Elliott Davis are brothers who suffered a terrible falling out years before the novel begins when one accepted and the other rejected their stepfather. Their lives have followed different trajectories ever since, but now, when both men are in their mid-twenties, they simultaneously confront the specter of parental responsibility themselves in relationships with women who have been damaged, in various ways, by their own fathers. Quincy, a high-school teacher, finds himself caught between a pregnant girlfriend he does not love, an old friend who suddenly reappears with a painful secret, and a mysterious little boy he believes to be his son. Elliott, his promising college basketball career curtailed by injury, seeks reluctantly to reconcile with a longtime girlfriend who has borne another man’s daughter. At the same time that Quincy and Elliott struggle to come to terms with the women in their lives, Delphine, the brothers’ younger sister, fights for her independence at the height of Boston’s school-busing wars. In the process she becomes the focus of an incident that brings the family together for the first time in a decade. Set in New York City and Boston in the summer of 1976, Somebody’s Child is a powerful examination from an African American perspective of two enduring questions: How do people become a family and how does a man become a father? With this gracefully evocative second novel, Williams takes his place among the most acutely perceptive and talented contemporary writers.