Goodbye, Sweetberry Park

WINNER, grand prize —2025 Hollywood Book Festival
Winner, general fiction —2025 New York Book Festival
Shortlist —Georgia Novel of the Year, 2026
“A big-hearted consideration of gentrification and the erosion of time.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A dizzying belly laugh and a gut punch, rolled into one.” —Atlanta magazine
"Full of history, down-home rhythms, and unabashed hucksterism, it’s a memorable slice of Americana." — Publishers Weekly
“Wickedly funny.” —Gwinnett Daily Post
“There’s no shortage of drama in this fast-paced, comic thriller full of snappy dialogue and big, colorful characters." —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"The wildest gentrification story ever told." —Booktasters

...

Archie “God” Johnson—so known for his flowing white hair, voluminous beard, and larger-than-life persona—is a veteran Atlanta journalist of Nigerian and Scots-Irish descent. When his racist White grandfather dies and leaves him a dilapidated Victorian house in the mostly Black neighborhood—a final curse from beyond the grave—Johnson moves to Sweetberry Park. As it happens, his life will never be the same.

Distraught after a personal tragedy and still bleary from a long drug binge he used to cope, Johnson pulls himself together and rebuilds the Victorian, finds acceptance among his new neighbors, and attempts to pick up the shards of his newsgathering career. Meanwhile, his newly beloved Sweetberry Park is threatened to its very core—the target of greedy, deceptive developers who want to knock down and gentrify the historic neighborhood where civil rights hero Martin Luther King had been looked after as a child.

Just as tensions reach a boiling point, police report that a deranged employee at the famed Atlanta Memorial Zoo has unleashed seventeen of the world’s deadliest snakes into the leafy urban enclave. The entire city panics, unleashing chaos, an accidental shooting, and an unjust incarceration.

With the help of a reclusive former blues songstress and a zany cast of old friends and millennial newcomers, Johnson attempts to save the neighborhood that saved him—with hilarious, and rather dubious, results.