“One of the finest young writers working today.” —New York
What does it mean to really see the world around you—to bear witness? And what does it cost us, both to see and not to see?

In Jamel Brinkley’s stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters—from children to grandmothers to ghosts—live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect with, stand up for, care for, and remember one another, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape their futures as well as the legacies and prospects of their communities and their city. In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, and the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony.

As upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Witness offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city.