Anissa Gray

Anissa Gray brings a journalist's attention to family history, withheld truths, and the social pressures that shape private lives. Life and Other Love Songs begins when Ozro Armstead disappears on his thirty-seventh birthday, leaving his wife Deborah and daughter Trinity to reconsider the man they thought they knew. Moving from the Great Migration through 1970s Detroit and into 1990s New York, the novel follows three generations of a Black American family. Music, work, race, class, and memory become connected parts of the mystery surrounding Oz's absence. Berkley first published the novel in 2023, and the paperback followed in 2024. Penguin Random House credits Dominic Hoffman, Karen Murray, and Nicole Lewis as performers of the audiobook. Gray, previously the author of The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls, structures this second novel across several viewpoints and periods, allowing each revelation to alter the reader's understanding of love, harm, and survival within the Armstead family.