Miracle at St. Anna

By: James McBride

Narrated by: Ted Daniel

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, and Deacon King Kong

James McBride’s powerful memoir, The Color of Water, was a groundbreaking literary phenomenon that transcended racial and religious boundaries, garnering unprecedented acclaim and topping bestseller lists for more than two years. Now McBride turns his extraordinary gift for storytelling to fiction—in a universal tale of courage and redemption inspired by a little-known historic event. In Miracle at St. Anna, toward the end of World War II, four Buffalo Soldiers from the Army’s Negro 92nd Division find themselves separated from their unit and behind enemy lines. Risking their lives for a country in which they are treated with less respect than the enemy they are fighting, they discover humanity in the small Tuscan village of St. Anna di Stazzema—in the peasants who shelter them, in the unspoken affection of an orphaned child, in a newfound faith in fellow man. And even in the face of unspeakable tragedy, they—and we—learn to see the small miracles of life.

This acclaimed novel is now a major motion picture directed by Spike Lee.

©2002 James McBride (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“McBride creates an intricate mosaic of narratives that ultimately becomes about betrayal and the complex moral landscape of war.”—The New York Times Book Review

"Full of miracles of friendship, of salvation and survival."—Los Angeles Times

“Searingly, soaringly beautiful…The book’s central theme, its essence, is a celebration of the human capacity for love.”—The Baltimore Sun

A profound piece of literature

How does he do it? How does James McBride expertly weave a forgotten part of Black American history and revision/ refashion it into a fully comprehensive account American military history? His work is so well rounded and researched you’d think he was simply reciting a story that he witnessed with his own eyes. This book is a must read for anyone looking to understand some of the important ways that the Black American and Italian immigrant experience informs the way we as a society process whiteness as a whole in modern society. The story uses the WW2 as its backdrop to explore characters that are used as avatars for all of the dead soldiers and survivors of war. McBride is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors and I’m so excited to see what he has next in store!

What a story! What a storyteller!

One would have to be as good a writer as McBride to capture the gentle brilliance this grand but succinct tale of the 92nd infantry. Of McBride's many tales, this one most quickly grabbed me by the imagination then gently took me through a thoroughly immersive experience of nearly lost (but vital) threads of history.

Just as Sam the Giant gently carried the dying boy tenderly swaddled in a tattered refugee rags through the 1200 year-old villages of Tuscany during an 80 year-old war, so McBride weaves this tale's dark threads of mystery, betrayal and retribution with humanity's brighter threads of innocence, courage, redemption and child-like faith to render what is brightest and most victorious in the human struggle.

Though this is a tale of the first US Negro fighting battalion, and each character's thoughts on the subject of race emerge in each narrative and narration, the book is not about race, because McBride seems to know that "race" and racism as a topic is divisive. Rather, this tale of how a lethal struggle, when war has rendered everyone a pauper, and thus equal, the example of child like faith, devotion and innocence can elevate an entire village and erase the issue of skin color altogether.

McBride's tale captivates us by gathering the threads of the reader's best self, then having so captured us in its web, the story takes us through the mysterious suspension if disbelief to the hellishness of WWII, while weaving history both ancient and recent to spin a tale so believable, I couldn't swear it was fiction. We know these characters are real because we've met them all. In fact, when we are being our best selves, we know we have been each one of them, in turns.

Not for nothing, the narration was sublime. Not since Frank Muller's Prince of Tides or Green Mile has a narrator so captured the essence of mixed race community. The narration was a whole separate work of art in itself, deserving a separate review all its own!

El desarrollo de la historia y la fuerza de los personajes en ella.

La relación entre el soldado americano y el niño herido, único sobreviviente del ataque y el amor que los une, así como el amor de de padre de Ludovico hacia Renata y la fortaleza de ella. Toda la historia es maravillosa.