Those Bones Are Not My Child

Jan 18, 2026 3:38 PM

Author:Toni Cade Bambara

'A magnum opus... Puts the reader at the heart of the horror that came to be called the Atlanta child murders' Toni Morrison

Zala Spencer is barely surviving on the margins of Atlanta's booming economy when she awakens one summer's morning in 1980 to find her teenage son, Sonny, has disappeared. As uneasy hours turn into desperate days, Zala realizes that Sonny is among the many cases of missing children beginning to attract national attention. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the authorities, who respond to Sonny's disappearance with cold indifference, Zala and her estranged husband embark on an epic search. Through the eyes of a family seized by anguish and terror, we watch a city roiling with political, racial, and class tensions.

Written over a span of twelve years, and edited by Toni Morrison, who called Those Bones Are Not My Child the author's magnum opus, Toni Cade Bambara's last novel leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare.

Reviews

A magnum opus... Puts the reader at the heart of the horror that came to be called the Atlanta child murders

—— Toni Morrison

A full-bloodied, important book and an eloquent final testament of a writer whose art was always dictated to by her humanity and sense of justice

—— Eileen Battersby , Irish Times

These Bones Are Not My Child isn't just a gripping thriller; it's a masterwork of American literature

—— Harper's Bazaar

Bambara has produced both a human drama and a steely report on contemporary society. . .admirable

—— The Times

Bambara's achievement - in this masterly work - is to voice this sense of loss, to give full human dimension to events that for too long many of us flashed by like billboards at highway speed

—— New York Times Book Review

Captures for all time a nightmare of private hate and public racism

—— Independent on Sunday

A woolly mammoth of a novel, truly worthy of being called an epic, a book with great big feet that sometimes take ponderous steps but that always hit the ground with the sound of thunder

—— Chicago Tribune

Riveting... A carefully crafted mystery [that is] difficult to put down

—— Boston Globe

Toni Cade Bambara's writing is so great it lifts you off the ground

—— New Statesman

Nobody writes with her breathtaking humor, empathy, ferocity, and surrealness... As a writer, her observation and humanity are timeless. As a reader, I release myself into Ms. Toni's sure and steady hands, knowing every part of me will be illuminated by her gaze

—— Adjoa Andoh

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