Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

A humorous and heart-wrenching story of a transgender woman's re-entry into life on the outside after twenty years in incarceration told over one whirlwind Fourth of July weekend

"An exuberant odyssey. Carlotta's passion for life is unstoppable . . . [Her] charm and zest allow the reader at times to forget the horrors she has lived through."
-THE GUARDIAN

"Don't let the title of this wondrous novel fool you. Hannaham cares deeply about Carlotta. From a mash-up of perspectives, he writes like a guardian angel. Or as our narrator says of Carlotta, when she's feeling elated 'like a drag queen doing a layup.'"
-JOHN IRVING, THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Carlotta is more than one to remember, she's a treasure."
-PAUL BEATTY, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sellout

"There's no one quite like Carlotta Mercedes, the transgender Black Colombian heroine - no, star - of the second novel by Hannaham."
-THE OBSERVER

"James Hannaham's dazzling Didn't Nobody Give a S*** What Happened to Carlotta deserves its place on the radar."
-THE INDEPENDENT

When Carlotta Mercedes was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she was born with. But not long after her conviction, she began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards.

Over twenty years later, Carlotta is granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed Brooklyn, where she struggles to reconcile with a family reluctant to accept her identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup.

Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Joyce's Ulysses does through Dublin. Hannaham introduces a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a society and prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.