Rob Franklin is the author of Great Black Hope, which is out June 2025 from Summit Books and Simon & Schuster UK.
You can pre-order it here, here, and here.
A gripping, elegant debut novel about a young black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamor and tragedy, a friend's mysterious death and his own arrest, from an electrifying new voice.
Praise for Great Black Hope
“A beautifully expansive novel about race, class, and the criminal justice system in America. Franklin’s emotional and intellectual range is vast, and in this exceptional debut, he deftly navigates the terrain of history and politics, rage and transformation.”
— Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies and A Separation
“Great Black Hope indeed! Rob Franklin’s brilliant storytelling explores and explodes every fact and fiction of those charged words; likewise, the intricacies and treacheries of privilege. Those categories we parse so confidently — class, race, gender, sexuality — are shaped into nuanced individual stories. His prose is elegant and searching, his pace flawless from start to finish.”
— Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Negroland
“The precision and ecstasy of Rob Franklin's prose had me entranced. Great Black Hope marks the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer.”
— Megha Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning
“Great Black Hope is at once a novel of crime—with a gripping pace, propelled by a question that needs answering—and a timeless coming of age story. Rob Franklin elegantly manages both with ease, tackling profound questions of race, class, sexuality, and identity, and writing so beautifully it’s hard to believe this is the author's debut.”
— Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
“It’s thrilling to see any author today aiming for the big stuff all at once: death, race, sex, class, addiction. It’s beyond thrilling—incandescent, even—when a writer like Rob Franklin comes along with the formal virtuosity to carry those lofty conceptual ambitions. Franklin’s prose is also eminently readable, frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and full of sentences I want to cut out and glue to my forehead. This book is so smart, so moving, so earned; as soon as I finished, I started reading it again.”
— Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!