The Seven Daughters of Dupree

Summary

For fans of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois comes a sweeping epic of seven generations of Black women, the secrets passed from mother to daughter, and the extraordinary resilience that carries one family across centuries.

It’s 1995, and fourteen-year-old Tati is determined to uncover the identity of her father. But her mother, Nadia, refuses to tell her, and her grandmother Gladys is just as determined to keep the past buried—including the truth about why she fled Land’s End, Alabama, in 1953.

Unbeknownst to Tati, the family has been cursed with a mysterious malediction: the Dupree women will only ever give birth to daughters. With each daughter’s arrival, the course of her mother’s life is irrevocably changed. In 1917, Jubi’s attempt to pass for white ends abruptly when she gives birth to Ruby. In 1934, Ruby’s fierce desire to be loved throws the family into chaos once again. And in 1980, a single night alters Nadia’s future forever.

The Seven Daughters of Dupree reveals how trauma, love, and hard-won resilience reverberate from one generation to the next. As Tati pieces together the truth about her family—and herself—she discovers that the Dupree women’s ultimate inheritance may not be the curse that has followed them for generations but the strength that has carried them through.