For the many readers familiar with Gerald Early's writing, Daughters will come as no surprise; it is a book he seemed destined to write. Those readers unfamiliar with his writing are in for one of those rare pleasures of discovery, for here is a writer of extraordinary grace and intelligence.

Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood is an astonishingly honest, unsentimental, and textured look at family life. It is the story of a faith struggle, as Mr. Early says in his preface, of how the members of a family come to believe in each other.

It is also a story where race, oddly, plays only a very small role; class is a great deal more important. But mostly, it is a tale that turns on the mundane events of family life; how people living together understand and support each other - even take joy in knowing each other - despite petty annoyances, blatant misunderstandings, embarrassments, ordinary but stressful trials, and numerous insensitivities.

With delicacy and uncanny intimacy, Gerald Early takes us into his family's - and his own - heart, and the result is one of the most profoundly redemptive memoirs in years.