The Occidental Book of the Dead

Pub Date: 10/06/2026

A Most Anticipated Book by the New York Times Book Review - Chicago Tribune - TIME - Harper's Bazaar - Los Angeles Times - Boston Globe - The Millions - Goodreads - AARP - Literary Hub - Chicago Review of Books - Publishers Weekly - Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal . . . and more!

"Johnson, the highly acclaimed author of Welcome to Braggsville (2015), reinvents the trope of the good (sort of) cop seduced into corruption in this wildly unpredictable novel. . . . a complex, often surprising morality tale." -- Booklist (starred review)

From the PEN/Faulkner finalist and National Book Award longlisted author of Welcome to Braggsville, comes this audacious and darkly funny literary crime masterpiece centered on a Black cop in an Atlanta precinct, whose façade of white alliance begins to crumble after a highly publicized murder

George Washington Jonson is determined to forge a new life. After growing up in one of Atlanta's poorest housing projects, he enlists in the U.S. Army and finds some relief serving abroad. When events lead him back home, he joins the police force. It's 1992, and Jonson is patrolling the streets he grew up on alongside his new partner, a shady legacy cop and self-described "redneck" who takes Jonson under his wing.

After a decade on the job, Jonson has fashioned a new life in an affluent suburb with his white wife and stepson, though he's still policing his old neighborhood, and now tasked with training hot-headed rookie recruits. One night on patrol a split-second confrontation with a white teenager takes a violent turn. That single gunshot sets into motion a series of escalating lies.
When the white-washed veneer of Jonson's life begins to crack, the story splits, presenting two contrasting versions of the American experience as he's forced to confront the history that shaped him and the compromises required of a good man in a broken system.

Employing a bold, inventive structure and spanning two fraught decades, vividly evoking the complexities of the South, and written with his trademark virtuosic dissonance, The Occidental Book of the Dead is a propulsive, pyrotechnic exploration of corruption and conspiracy in a nation divided.

Born and raised in the American South, T. Geronimo Johnson is the bestselling author of Welcome to Braggsville, longlisted for the National Book Award and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence; and Hold It 'Til It Hurts, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He won the inaugural Joyce Carol Oates Award, the Rome Prize, Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and the William Saroyan International Prize, received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he later taught writing, and has held Stegner and Iowa Arts fellowships.