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Alice Walker
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The Temple of My Familiar Paperback – Bargain Price, September 3, 2010

by Alice Walker (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 678 ratings
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First published in 1990, The Temple of My Familiar, Alice Walker’s follow-up novel to her iconic The Color Purple, spent more than four months on the New York Times Bestseller list and was hailed by critics as a “major achievement” (Chicago Tribune).

Described by the author as “a romance of the last 500,000 years,” The Temple of My Familiar follows a cast of interrelated characters, most of African descent, and each representing a different ethnic strain—ranging from diverse African tribes to the mixed bloods of Latin America—that contribute to the black experience in America.

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  1. Book 2 of 3
    The Color Purple
  2. Print length
    432 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Mariner Books
  5. Publication date
    September 3, 2010
  6. Dimensions
    7.96 x 5.6 x 1.01 inches
  7. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Walker holds a rare place in the history of African-American women writers...The Temple of My Familiar is brilliant." (Essence )

"As a sequel to The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar is a major achievement." (Chicago Tribune )

About the Author

Best-selling novelist ALICE WALKER is the author of five other novels, five collections of short stories, six collections of essays, seven volumes of poetry, including the most recent Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, and several children’s books. Her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0058M8H3M
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books; Reprint edition (September 3, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.96 x 5.6 x 1.01 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 678 ratings

About the author

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Alice Walker

Alice Walker

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Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. In 1983, Walker became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her novel The Color Purple, which also won the National Book Award. Her other books include The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, The Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy. In her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
678 global ratings
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1 Star
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My book came damaged. The pages in the inside are ripped at the ends :( So sad about it.
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Top reviews from the United States

V. MILNE
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2024
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Another great Alice Walker book!
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Edith
5.0 out of 5 stars A woman who knows her place in the Universe
Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2019
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I read this book in my early 20s and it has remained my all time favorite book. I am about to read it again at the age 65 and am looking forward to experiencing it at this stage of my life. I remember the intricate tapestry she wove with her words, beliefs and thoughts. The connection she made made me visualize from the single celled to the living creatures we are now. To see the everyday magic that is real in our lives seen through the quantum physics of it all! A masterpiece of writing that I have related to many books I have read that relate to those searching for the meaning of life and our power to manifest our dreams through the magic of the power that we all have access to. This book is about religion, spirituality, love, and our oneness with this amazing universe that we are all a part of. An amazing book written by a woman who is clearly in touch with her place in the Iniverse.
43 people found this helpful
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Shantilly Lace
4.0 out of 5 stars The story is designed to feel familiar
Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2012
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Alice Walker is a great storyteller, she intertwines two stories with different cultures and similar backgrounds and for many it is confusing to keep up with. She weaves it in a way you always know which character is which and what story you are learning about. I can put myself visually in the situation watching it happen and can't imagine the pain, humiliation, a stripping of your humanity at the hands of people who have no regard for human life. The boats and the conditions were horrendous and those that survived were never the same.

I'm still in the middle of the book but I feel with these stories and occurrences the people never forget the treatment of their experience, but they never let it overtake them and inhibit their movement forward. It is a lesson for all of us that the world can throw curveballs and hand you lemons but you make something out of yourself and never stay a victim. She is one of my favorite authors and I never grow tired of reading her books over and over.
7 people found this helpful
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LillianG
5.0 out of 5 stars It felt good reading this book
Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2022
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Even tho is was confusing between characters going to the past life to present life then moving to siblings then moving on to lovers, this book is very memorable. It's background on racism starting in Africa is truly heart breaking but it happened. I wish and hope the younger generation know their origins and be proud.
6 people found this helpful
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Alia A
5.0 out of 5 stars Get Familiar
Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2021
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This is one of the books that I absolutely cannot live without. It’s not a novel. It’s an oral history. A branch off the family tree. It’s the child sitting between her mothers knees getting her hair greased and parted while listening to her mother’s friends spill everyone else’s business but their own.

Sometimes I might read a book that takes me out of my safe zone and into dark and turbulent territory. This is not that book. This is the book I call on to immediately pick me up and take me back to my happy place.

If you haven’t already, get familiar with Alice Walker’s The Temple Of My Familiar.
23 people found this helpful
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Akethan
3.0 out of 5 stars Muddy and over-complicated...
Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2001
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I found it way too convoluted. Way. I gave up separating the characters as near the end of the book she casually slipped in and out of each of their dialogues. I liked the layer of lives idea and facing the loops we live in and meeting people again that we have connections with. Anyone ever read JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL? That was what I was thinking - each of these characters has to keep repeating their life until they learn from their mistakes. Pretty in parts, frustrating in parts, and way too convoluted. There.
20 people found this helpful
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Baked Bri, 3 underscores
5.0 out of 5 stars one of the greatest books of all time, seriously overlooked
Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2020
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This marvelous book contains so much I've been reading it a decade. I can't believe only one person wrote it. I can't believe she's gone. Or was ever here. And that's the sense of the book, if that helps. From the apes to Africa to modern day...from a character named Lissie needing two men to love her she was so much people to the richest colored Latin fabrics & feathers you could dream. Please someone make several movies of it. The parts that are poetry won't translate medium as well, but call Coppola.
8 people found this helpful
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Gege
5.0 out of 5 stars Heighten level of cultural and relatable and real experiences.
Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2021
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My friends and I decided to start a book club and someone recommended this book. To sum it up, the book is beautifully written. Alice's writing technique is enriched with a heighten level of cultural and relatable and real experiences. Amazing book.
2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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CB
5.0 out of 5 stars A Foundation-Shaker!
Reviewed in Canada on May 29, 2015
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Definitely came used and a bit worn but well-loved and readable. Excellent story of intertwining lives, and as usual Alice Walker takes characters from her other novels and weaves them throughout her universe to create a well-rounded group of souls who have impacted the structure of our world today from a unique and mysterious historical perspective. This book--my second copy, and happily reread--forces your mind to expand and your eyes to widen.
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Zanna Star
5.0 out of 5 stars <3
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 15, 2013
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"Obenjomade, clean out your ears: THE WHITE MAN IS STILL HERE. Even when he leaves, he is not gone."

"Obenjomade, cup your endearingly large ears: EVERYONE ALL OVER THE WORLD KNOWS EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT THE WHITE MAN. That's the essential meaning of television. BUT THEY KNOW NEXT TO NOTHING ABOUT THEMSELVES."

"If you tear out the tongue of another, you have a tongue in your hand for the rest of your life. You are responsible, therefore, for all that person might have said."

Folk Memory, Matriarchy and Writing Back

Through the Black woman Lissie and the Latina/First Nation woman Zede, Walker speculates about pre-colonisation African and American societies, with anarchist and matriarchal or segregated organisations. She does this in a beautiful, poetic, magical realist style, freely imagining and reimagining myths and relationships between groups and even species. I think a number of reviewers have not understood or enjoyed this aspect of the book. I think it's about opening human possibilities into a space of folk-memory rather than a utopian future. Since kyriarchy has constructed human history we should not accept its interpretation. If myths and meta-narratives shape us, we urgently need to rewrite those that have deformed us. In particular, I love her rewriting of the Adam and Eve story to address the racism of Western Christianity and remove blame from Woman. This writing back is Walker’s answer to the quote above. The White man is still here even after he has left, so we have to replace him with something. We need an antidote to his poison.

Beauty and Play

I love the way Alice Walker sees the beauty in everything and always chooses the beauty, without censoring the painful truth. I love the simple values she upholds: love & care & pleasure & health & spiritual wholeness. It's so un-elitist and sensible compared to (usually really privileged) authors and their characters who are sunk in malaise and can find nothing to satisfy them in a comfortable existence. Walker's mode of description and appreciation of bodies, especially Black women's bodies, is radical because it dismantles the Whiteness, thin-ness and general hegemony of beauty. The contrast becomes explicit when a male character Suwelo describes a woman who Walker earlier described in a totally different way: his conventional description of her performance of femininity in terms of male sexuality is exactly what we expect. He reads Carlotta’s high heels sexually, in contrast to Walker’s earlier description of dressing up as play.

Black History

When I read about the life in which Lissie was an African child/woman sold into slavery I had to slow down, I was sitting on the tube and I found myself stopping to stare into space repeatedly. The story of the nursing mothers whose babies had been taken or killed offering their milk to feed children and salve wounds is so moving. I wonder if this is true? I have never heard it before. On reading to the end of this chapter, to the part about women being raped and impregnated on the middle passage and the slavers being paid extra for pregnant women, I could not continue with the book and had to sit still on the train until I got to my stop. Although I have read about this before, Walker's folk-memory telling brought it inside me for the first time - it is inside all of us, in the sense that memory and memes inhabit us communally, and in the sense of history creating us and the circumstances of our lives: in my case, the wealth and comfort I enjoy rests on the backs of those women and men who were stolen and enslaved.

Health and Environment, Colonialism and Academia

I think this book, in many ways is about how to live, and Walker is obviously angry about the way Black people in particular have been cut off from health and harmony with the Earth by poverty, slavery and the theft of their lands.

“’Like the Hopi in your country, most ancient Africans thought of the earth as a body that needs all its organs and bones and blood in order to function properly. The ore miners were forced out, the theory goes. They went north.’ ‘Yes,’ said Fanny, frowning, ‘and unfortunately in about 1492 they continued West’”

One of my favourite characters in the book is Fanny Nzingha, the granddaughter of Celie, protagonist of The Colour Purple. She is involved in many serious conversations about colonialism. In a way, she is the book’s criticizer, while Lissie is its source of hope and restoration. She represents the awakened, angry consciousness of injustice for me. I was happy that she found her African sister Nzingha Anne.

“’In the United States there is the maddening illusion of freedom without substance. It’s never solid, unequivocal, irrevocable. So much depends on the horrid politicians the white majority elects. Black people have the oddest feeling, I think, of forever running in place’”

This is an incredible book that successfully synthesises a huge wealth of ideas. It’s really beyond me to do it justice in a review.
12 people found this helpful
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gem
5.0 out of 5 stars たまもののような本
Reviewed in Japan on March 25, 2007
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アリスウォーカーの「カラーパープル」の続きとなる作品。

２０才の頃読み、またまたノックアウトされた。私にとっては、「カラーパープル」こちらのほうが、より傑作である。

まさに「原始、女性は太陽であった」である。

自然を畏怖すること、自分のセックス観、自我、五感を大事にすること

それらを教えてくれた。、

太古の昔から、１９世紀のイギリスから、現代まで、時代と場所が交互に錯綜するのも読んでいて楽しい。

小説中に、シャグという女性が教会をひらき、「シャグの福音書」

これは、私にとって、なくてはならないものです。全部で２７あるのですが、その中から三つ。

欠点を切り捨てず、あるがままに人を愛するものは救われる。彼らには思考の明晰さが与えられるだろう。

動物や植物のあらゆる色を愛するのと同じように、すべての人間のあらゆる肌の色を愛する者は救われる。彼らはその子孫や祖先、また彼ら自身のしべてについて知ることができる。

死の恐れを乗り越える者は救われる。一枚の草の葉に未来を見る力は彼らのものである。

そして、知る者は救われる。
8 people found this helpful
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Natalie A. Pavlis
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazingly beautiful
Reviewed in Canada on July 12, 2020
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Beautifully written. I’ve read this book many times and it reveals something new and beautiful to me each time
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BOOK RAVEN
5.0 out of 5 stars Staggering in it's subject matter
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 24, 2017
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Startling and wonderfully subversive - an absolute joy to read - it stayed with me for days after I'd finished it. I really unusual and different way of looking at life, compatibility, sexual attraction and reincarnation. I would say that this book really has changed my life. So much so that I want to get it in hard copy (I read it originally on Kindle) so I can annotate the book for quotations. A true and absolute delight.
5 people found this helpful
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