The Princeton Son

THE PRINCETON SON A Novel

He is the biracial, adopted son of the 47th President of the United States.

He has spent twenty years learning how to be in any room - the only Black face in most of them, the President's boy in all of them, a Princeton freshman now wearing the number his father once wore on the same court. He has always known how to perform. He has not yet learned what it costs.

This is the story of Myles Armstrong's junior year. A Final Four. A loss that was also a love story. A father learning, at last, to be a father - and a son learning that being someone's child is not the same as being someone's project.

Her name was Lena Ortega. She died before he could ask her the question he had been carrying since October. The banner with her name still hangs in Jadwin Gym, thirty years later.

Told in luminous, hymn-like prose, The Princeton Son is a novel about glory and grief arriving in the same breath. About a young man discovering what it means to be Black inside an institution that calls its measurements neutral. About a father learning how to kneel. About a community learning to mourn without breaking.

For readers of Tayari Jones, Marilynne Robinson, and James McBride.

"We belong to each other. That is the only championship worth lifting."