From the first page of “Another Brooklyn,” her first novel for adults in two decades, we find evidence of an author once again engaged in excavating family narratives, and in exploring the painful experience of making her way as a black girl in America. The novel, which is one of this year’s National Book Awards finalists in the Fiction category, tells the story of August and her friends Gigi, Angela, and Sylvia, four adolescents in nineteen-seventies Brooklyn who are “sharing the weight of growing up Girl … as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.” It is a book, Woodson writes in an author’s note, for which she mined her own teen-age years in New York, revisiting “the slow-motion ferocity of the end of childhood.” Check 2016 National Book Award

2. Berlin Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2016
Photos from Reuters

4. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty
Images for Mercedes-Benz)

21. (Britta Pedersen/dpa via AP)

25. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty
Images for Mercedes-Benz)

35. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for
Mercedes-Benz)

37. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty
Images for Mercedes-Benz)

45. END21-ENERO-2016