"The Fugitivities is a thrilling twenty-first-century sentimental education--a tale of black intellectual guilt and irrepressible wanderlust that follows a young teacher from disillusionment in Brooklyn to doubt and revelation abroad. McCarthy's spiraling, observant, exquisitely cadenced prose is a shot of adrenaline in a sea of laconic and episodic fiction. A powerful debut that is worldly in the most expansive sense--and with electricity to spare." --Julian Lucas, New Yorker staff writer

"The Fugitivities is an ambitious, debut novel that speaks to the deepest of vulnerabilities of the human condition: how we make sense of our identities as it relates to others and our stake and responsibilities in the world." --Morgan Jerkins, author of This Will Be My Undoing

"A gorgeous, virtuosic novel. In exquisite, often ecstatic, prose, McCarthy gives us a portrait of the artist as a black man--or rather, as a set of young black men, brothers and friends and rivals. This is blackness as it collides with class and love. Blackness in its uneasy relationship to Europe and the Americas. Blackness in all of its inner intricacy, tension, and beauty. Blackness shattered from the inside, each facet spinning, in McCarthy's own words, in "a hypnotic dance like shards in a kaleidoscope." --Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift