Pomegranate: A Novel

Pomegranate follows Ranita Atwater as she walks out of a Massachusetts women’s prison and tries to rebuild a life that addiction and incarceration smashed apart. With a pomegranate’s ruby chambers as her touchstone, she reaches for her children, faces a state system that almost guarantees she’ll fail, and works her program one meeting, one truth, one choice at a time.

We move forward and backward through the years: a tender father with a garden; a brilliant, punishing mother; a first love who spirals into dope; a second who turns violence into honeyed words; and Maxine, the fierce inside love who teaches Ranita to conjure oceans and name the free things. Therapy opens the locked rooms. NA keeps her honest. Street corners tug. Old keys turn in long-lost doors. And at a queer open mic, a voice that once shut itself to stay safe opens and sings again.

This is an intimate, unflinching portrait of Black family, womanhood, and recovery. It’s about the body that remembers what the mind wants to forget. It’s about the long road back, when love is a practice and freedom is a daily decision.

• Listeners who want a visceral, compassionate story about recovery and reentry
• Readers drawn to complex mother–daughter dynamics and intergenerational truths
• Anyone navigating NA/AA, therapy, or long-haul healing who needs a companion voice

Helen Elaine Lee is the author of Pomegranate, The Serpent’s Gift, and Water Marked. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, she has long worked at the intersection of storytelling and justice, volunteering with and helping to establish PEN New England’s Prison Creative Writing Program. She is a professor in Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT. Her work is known for its empathy, rigor, and attention to the lives of people too often pushed to the margins.