Black Folx Book Club: "Jackson Alone" by Jose Ando

Join Greedy Reads bookseller Leela Chantrelle for the Black Folx Book Club, a reading space for Black women and Black queers reading works by Black women and Black queers.

The Black Folx Book Club meets in person at our Remington store. Please register here to let us know you'll join us!

Please note that the June book pick has been changed to Jackson Alone by Jose Ando! You can purchase your copy here.

About Jackson Alone

Four Black Japanese gay men team up against a culture where discrimination is deep-seated and revenge is just a click away. A searing, darkly funny debut from the Akutagawa Prize–winning author.

Nobody at the corporate offices of Athletius Japan knows much about the massage therapist Jackson—but rumors abound. He used to work as a model. He likes to party. He’s mixed race—half-Japanese, half-somewhere-in-Africa-n. He might be gay. Fueling the gossip is the sudden appearance of a violent pornographic video featuring a man who looks a lot like Jackson.

When Jackson serendipitously meets three other queer mixed-race guys, he learns he’s not the only one being targeted. Together they concoct a plan: find out who’s responsible and, in the meantime, switch identities and play tricks on people—a boyfriend, a boss—who’ve wronged them, exploiting the fact that nobody can seem to tell them apart.

A short, blistering gut punch of a novel, Jackson Alone is at turns satirical and deadpan, angry and tender—a frank exploration of identity, race, queerness, and discrimination in contemporary Japan that announces Jose Ando as a singular new talent in the global literary scene.