This vision of Eden hovers over the rest of the novel

Ayana Mathis is the rare first-time author who is guaranteed thousands of readers, thanks to Oprah Winfrey, who selected "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie" for Oprah's Book Club 2.0. Winfrey compared Mathis' first novel to the work of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, whose work was selected four times for Oprah's original book club, beginning in 1996 with "Song of Solomon," a third novel published when she was a relative unknown. For better or worse, Mathis has huge shoes to fill.

"The Twelve Tribes of Hattie" opens in 1925, when Mathis' matriarch, Hattie Shepherd - mother of 11 and grandmother of one, her "12 tribes," in a biblical reference to the patriarch Jacob - is 16, and newly wed. She and her husband, August, are refugees from the Jim Crow South, two teenagers caught up in the historic 20th century migration of African Americans to the North. In an exuberant mood, young Hattie names their newborn twins Philadelphia and Jubilee - "names of promise and of hope, reaching forward names, not looking back ones."

Hattie has what turns out to be a brief interlude of contentment in the small house on Wayne Street in Philadelphia that August rents for his new family. "It rained every morning, but the afternoons were bright and the grass in Hattie and August's tiny square of lawn was green as the first day of the world," Mathis writes. "The three of them, Hattie and her twins, dozed in the shade on the porch." This vision of Eden hovers over the rest of the novel as a bitter reminder of Hattie's blighted dreams.

In visceral, heart-wrenching scenes, Mathis describes Hattie's days-long struggle to save the twins from pneumonia. "Hattie's babies burned brightly: their fevers spiked, their legs wheeled, their cheeks went red as suns." As she fights to save her babies, Hattie recalls seeing her father collapsed in the corner of his smithy back in Georgia, murdered by two white men, and fleeing through the woods two days later with her mother and two sisters to board a train to Philadelphia. Her mother dies, her sisters head back south, and Hattie is left an orphan, a stranger, unaccustomed to the "crackling cold."

When the furnace fails, she heads desperately to a neighbor's, where the twins die.

After this moving opening, Mathis flashes forward, revealing in chapters dated from 1948 to 1980 how Hattie's grief at the loss of her firstborn twins distorts her maternal love and afflicts her nine surviving children with a range of plagues, from crippling self-doubt to dramatic self-destruction.

In the first of these self-contained chapters, we meet her son Floyd, a musician traveling through the South in 1948, troubled by sexual confusion and shame. Hattie's son Six is tormented by scars from burns inflicted when he fell into a tub of scalding water as a boy. Six has bouts of violence balanced by fits of Bible-spouting eloquence. The story of Hattie's daughter Bell begins as she lies dying of tuberculosis in a run-down ghetto apartment in 1975, fantasizing about her mother's soup. "Hattie had kept them all alive with sheer will and collard greens and some old southern remedies. Mean as the dickens, though."

And on it goes. Ruthie is the child of another man, born after Hattie has put up with 25 years of August's womanizing. Franklin follows his father's pattern, losing the woman he loves. Alice's marriage to a doctor is haunted by childhood abuse shared with her brother Billups. Hattie is forced by economic necessity to give her last baby, Ella, born in 1956, away to her childless sister Pearl, back in Georgia.

By 1980, her daughter Cassie is succumbing to madness, with banshee voices insisting that her mother is trying to poison her. Hattie faces yet another challenge in Cassie's daughter, the new generation. It's no surprise that the last chapter features a sermon about the trials of Job. And that somehow Hattie finds the grit to go on.

Mathis has been forthright about her influences. Marilynne Robinson was her mentor at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop (and like Robinson, she knows how to shape a scene to hit the emotional jugular). Morrison's "Beloved," she says, was her "manual." With its historic sweep and focus on an African American mother faced with brutal choices, "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie" bears some resemblance to "Beloved."

But Mathis has little of Morrison's mystical bent. Her structure is more akin to short stories in a linked collection than fully integrated chapters in a novel. And her plainspoken prose conveys intimacy more readily than mythic resonance.

"The Twelve Tribes of Hattie" is an exceptional first novel. Some of Mathis' characters are more fully rendered than others, some of her plotting is melodramatic, and she leaves us with a trail of unanswered questions. But she brings considerable empathic gifts to the detailed realistic snapshots in Hattie's family album, and to the sense of displacement that has contributed to generations of troubles and travails. Her challenge will be to stay true to her talents until after the Oprah hubbub dies down.